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Articles 1 - 25 of 25
Full-Text Articles in Business
10 Things Judges Should Know About Cryptocurrency, Lee Reiners
10 Things Judges Should Know About Cryptocurrency, Lee Reiners
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Cryptocurrency And The State: An Unholy Alliance, Lee Reiners
Cryptocurrency And The State: An Unholy Alliance, Lee Reiners
Faculty Scholarship
This article contextualizes the rise of cryptocurrency within the historical relationship between money and the state. It begins by asking two simple yet critical questions: What is money and where did it come from? Armed with the answers, the article proceeds by taking a fresh look at cryptocurrency through the lens of the credit theory of money. It finds that cryptocurrency, by using new technologies and incentive-based design, attempts to overcome the previous geographic limitations that hindered broad adoption of private currencies. Even with these innovations, cryptocurrency appeared unlikely to challenge the supremacy of sovereign money until Facebook announced the …
Tepoel Lecture: Bond Trustees And The Rising Challenge Of Activist Investors, Steven L. Schwarcz
Tepoel Lecture: Bond Trustees And The Rising Challenge Of Activist Investors, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Securitization Ten Years After The Financial Crisis: An Overview, Steven L. Schwarcz
Securitization Ten Years After The Financial Crisis: An Overview, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This symposium issue examines securitization a decade after the 2008 financial crisis. Prior to the crisis, securitization was one of America’s dominant means of financing. Many observers, however, blamed securitization for causing the crisis, sparking regulation that arguably has been overly restrictive and, in some cases, even punitive. Where are we now?
Regulating Complacency: Human Limitations And Legal Efficacy, Steven L. Schwarcz
Regulating Complacency: Human Limitations And Legal Efficacy, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines how insights into limited human rationality can improve financial regulation. The Article identifies four categories of limitations—herd behavior, cognitive biases, overreliance on heuristics, and a proclivity to panic—that undermine the perfect-market regulatory assumptions that parties have full information and will act in their rational self-interest. The Article then analyzes how insights into these limitations can be used to correct resulting market failures. Requiring more robust disclosure and due diligence, for example, can help to reduce reliance on misleading information cascades that motivate herd behavior. Debiasing through law, such as requiring more specific, poignant, and concrete disclosure of …
Benchmark Regulation, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher
Benchmark Regulation, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher
Faculty Scholarship
Benchmarks are metrics that are deeply embedded in the financial markets. They are essential to the efficient functioning of the markets and are used in a wide variety of ways—from pricing oil to setting interest rates for consumer lending to valuing complex financial instruments. In recent years, benchmarks have also been at the epicenter of numerous, multi-year market manipulation scandals. Oil traders, for example, deliberately execute trades to drive benchmarks lower artificially, allowing the traders to capitalize on the manipulated benchmarks. This ensures that later trades relying on the benchmarks will be more profitable than they otherwise would have been. …
Rethinking Corporate Governance For A Bondholder Financed, Systemically Risky World, Steven L. Schwarcz
Rethinking Corporate Governance For A Bondholder Financed, Systemically Risky World, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This Article makes two arguments that, combined, demonstrate an important synergy: first, including bondholders in corporate governance could help to reduce systemic risk because bondholders are more risk averse than shareholders; second, corporate governance should include bondholders because bonds now dwarf equity as a source of corporate financing and bond prices are increasingly tied to firm performance.
Too Big To Fool: Moral Hazard, Bailouts, And Corporate Responsibility, Steven L. Schwarcz
Too Big To Fool: Moral Hazard, Bailouts, And Corporate Responsibility, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
Domestic and international regulatory efforts to prevent another financial crisis have been converging on the idea of trying to end the problem of “too big to fail”—that systemically important financial firms take excessive risks because they profit from success and are (or at least, expect to be) bailed out by government money to avoid failure. The legal solutions being advanced to control this morally hazardous behavior tend, however, to be inefficient, ineffective, or even dangerous—such as breaking up firms and limiting their size, which can reduce economies of scale and scope; or restricting central bank authority to bail out failing …
Controlling Systemic Risk Through Corporate Governance, Steven L. Schwarcz
Controlling Systemic Risk Through Corporate Governance, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
Most of the regulatory measures to control excessive risk taking by systemically important firms are designed to reduce moral hazard and to align the interests of managers and investors. These measures may be flawed because they are based on questionable assumptions. Excessive corporate risk taking is, at its core, a corporate governance problem. Shareholder primacy requires managers to view the consequences of their firm’s risk taking only from the standpoint of the firm and its shareholders, ignoring harm to the public. In governing, managers of systemically important firms should also consider public harm. This proposal engages the long-standing debate whether …
Keynote Address, Regulating Corporate Governance In The Public Interest: The Case Of Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz
Keynote Address, Regulating Corporate Governance In The Public Interest: The Case Of Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
There’s long been a debate whether corporate governance law should require some duty to the public. The accepted wisdom is not to require such a duty—that corporate profit maximization provides jobs and other public benefits that exceed any harm. This is especially true, the argument goes, because imposing specific regulatory requirements and making certain actions illegal or tortious can mitigate the harm without unduly impairing corporate wealth production. Whether that is true in other contexts, this paper—delivered as the keynote address at the June 2016 National Business Law Scholars Conference at The University of Chicago Law School—questions if it’s true …
Shadow Banking And Regulation In China And Other Developing Countries, Steven L. Schwarcz
Shadow Banking And Regulation In China And Other Developing Countries, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
The rapid but largely unregulated growth in shadow banking in developing countries such as China can jeopardize financial stability. This article discusses that growth and argues that a regulatory balance is needed to help protect financial stability while preserving shadow banking as an important channel of alternative funding. The article also analyzes how that regulation could be designed.
Misalignment: Corporate Risk-Taking And Public Duty, Steven L. Schwarcz
Misalignment: Corporate Risk-Taking And Public Duty, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This article argues for a “public governance duty” to help manage excessive risk-taking by systemically important firms. Although governments worldwide, including the United States, have issued an array of regulations to attempt to curb that risk-taking by aligning managerial and investor interests, those regulations implicitly assume that investors would oppose excessively risky business ventures. That leaves a critical misalignment: because much of the harm from a systemically important firm’s failure would be externalized onto the public, including ordinary citizens impacted by an economic collapse, such a firm can engage in risk-taking ventures with positive expected value to its investors but …
Perspectives On Regulating Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz
Perspectives On Regulating Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This book chapter, which synthesizes several of the author’s articles, attempts to provide useful perspectives on regulating systemic risk. First, it argues that systemic shocks are inevitable. Accordingly, regulation should be designed not only to try to reduce those shocks but also to protect the financial system against their unavoidable impact. This could be done, the chapter explains, by applying chaos theory to help stabilize the financial system. The chapter then focuses on trying to prevent excessive corporate risk-taking, which is one of the leading triggers of systemic shocks and widely regarded to have been a principal cause of the …
Understanding The Global In Global Finance And Regulation, Lawrence G. Baxter
Understanding The Global In Global Finance And Regulation, Lawrence G. Baxter
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Corporate Risk-Taking And Public Duty, Steven L. Schwarcz
Corporate Risk-Taking And Public Duty, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Putting The Securities Laws To The Test: The Long-Standing Approach To Federal Securities Regulation Is Not Working, Elisabeth De Fontenay
Putting The Securities Laws To The Test: The Long-Standing Approach To Federal Securities Regulation Is Not Working, Elisabeth De Fontenay
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Extraterritorial Impacts Of Recent Financial Regulation Reforms: A Complex World Of Global Finance, Lawrence G. Baxter
Extraterritorial Impacts Of Recent Financial Regulation Reforms: A Complex World Of Global Finance, Lawrence G. Baxter
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Comments On The September 29, 2014 Fsb Consultative Document, ‘Cross-Border Recognition Of Resolution Action’, Steven L. Schwarcz, Mark Jewett, Bruce Leonard, Catherine Walsh, David Kempthorne
Comments On The September 29, 2014 Fsb Consultative Document, ‘Cross-Border Recognition Of Resolution Action’, Steven L. Schwarcz, Mark Jewett, Bruce Leonard, Catherine Walsh, David Kempthorne
Faculty Scholarship
This CIGI Paper No. 51 was released on December 3, 2014 by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) as a response to the Financial Stability Board’s (FSB) Consultative Document, “Cross-Border Recognition of Resolution Action.” Principally authored by CIGI Senior Fellow Steven L. Schwarcz (who works with the think tank’s International Law Research Program), the Paper comments on the policy measures proposed by the FSB, an international body that monitors and makes recommendations about the global financial system, to address the cross-border legal uncertainties of troubled systemically important financial firms. In that context, the Paper explains why a statutory approach …
The Bankruptcy-Law Safe Harbor For Derivatives: A Path-Dependence Analysis, Steven L. Schwarcz, Ori Sharon
The Bankruptcy-Law Safe Harbor For Derivatives: A Path-Dependence Analysis, Steven L. Schwarcz, Ori Sharon
Faculty Scholarship
U.S. bankruptcy law grants special rights and immunities to creditors in derivatives transactions, including virtually unlimited enforcement rights. This article argues that these rights and immunities result from a form of path dependence, a sequence of industry-lobbied legislative steps, each incremental and in turn serving as apparent justification for the next step, without a rigorous and systematic vetting of the consequences. Because the resulting “safe harbor” has not been fully vetted, its significance and utility should not be taken for granted; and thus regulators, legislators, and other policymakers—whether in the United States or abroad—should not automatically assume, based on its …
Regulating Systemic Risk In Insurance, Daniel Schwarcz, Steven L. Schwarcz
Regulating Systemic Risk In Insurance, Daniel Schwarcz, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
As exemplified by the dramatic failure of AIG, insurance companies and their affiliates played a central role in the 2008 global financial crisis. It is therefore not surprising that the Dodd-Frank Act—the United States’ primary legislative re-sponse to the crisis—contained an entire title dedicated to insurance regulation, which has traditionally been the responsibility of individual states. The most important insurance-focused reforms in Dodd-Frank empower the Federal Reserve Bank to impose an additional layer of regulatory scrutiny on top of state insurance regulation for a small number of “systemically important” nonbank financial companies, such as AIG. This Article argues, however, that …
Do The Securities Laws Matter? The Rise Of The Leveraged Loan Market, Elisabeth De Fontenay
Do The Securities Laws Matter? The Rise Of The Leveraged Loan Market, Elisabeth De Fontenay
Faculty Scholarship
One of the enduring principles of federal securities regulation is the mantra that bonds are securities, while commercial loans are not. Yet the corporate bond and loan markets in the U.S. are rapidly converging, putting significant pressure on the disparity in their regulatory treatment. As securities, corporate bonds are subject to onerous public disclosure obligations and liability regimes, which corporate loans avoid entirely. This longstanding regulatory distinction between loans and bonds is based on the traditional conception of a commercial loan as a long-term relationship between the borrowing company and a single bank, in contrast to bonds, which may be …
Strengthening Financial Reporting: An Essay On Expanding The Auditor’S Opinion Letter, James D. Cox
Strengthening Financial Reporting: An Essay On Expanding The Auditor’S Opinion Letter, James D. Cox
Faculty Scholarship
Users of financial statements, foremost of which are investors, have a voracious appetite for information that better enables them to assess the financial position and performance of the reporting firm. Even though financial statements purport to address their needs, because the statements, which are prepared by the firm’s managers, conceal a range of managerial estimates, assumptions, judgments, and choices, investors are deprived of the most fundamental kernel of information they seek, namely the overall quality of the financial reports themselves. In this Article, the author sets forth several modest steps that would enhance the overall quality of financial reporting by …
Lawyers In The Shadows: The Transactional Lawyer In A World Of Shadow Banking, Steven L. Schwarcz
Lawyers In The Shadows: The Transactional Lawyer In A World Of Shadow Banking, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This article examines how the role of transactional lawyers should change in the new world of shadow banking. Although transactional lawyers should consider the potential systemic consequences of their client's actions, their actions should be tempered by their primary duties to the client and by their responsibilities to the l,egal system more broadly.
Did We Tame The Beast: Views On The Us Financial Reform Bill, Lawrence G. Baxter
Did We Tame The Beast: Views On The Us Financial Reform Bill, Lawrence G. Baxter
Faculty Scholarship
Prof. Lawrence Baxter takes a microscope to the ‘Dodd-Frank’ Bill (Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, H.R. 4173) finding a veritable ’Micrographia’ of doubt. The Bill was devised to address problems associated with the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. This paper was written in anticipation of the US Financial Reform Bill’s passage through Congress. The legislation has since been enacted as Public Law No. 111-203, signed by President Obama on July 21, 2010.
Derivatives, Corporate Hedging, And Shareholder Wealth: Modigliani-Miller Forty Years Later, Kimberly D. Krawiec
Derivatives, Corporate Hedging, And Shareholder Wealth: Modigliani-Miller Forty Years Later, Kimberly D. Krawiec
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.