Law Commons^™

Regulatory Managerialism Inaction: A Case Study Of Bank Regulation And Climate Change, Hilary J. Allen

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In November of 2029, Hurricane Penelope struck New York City as a category two storm. Work had started on a wall to protect Manhattan from rising sea levels and storm surges, but the work was incomplete, and significant damage to Manhattan real estate was sustained. While almost all that real estate was insured, insurance companies were compromised by the sheer magnitude of the losses. Even with significant federal subsidies, they were unable to meet their full commitments on insurance policies. Some commercial real estate firms, who had never really recovered from the shift to remote working during the Covid pandemic, …

Securitizing Digital Debts, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

The promise of financial technology (“fintech”) and artificial intelligence (“AI”) in broadening access to financial products and services continues to capture the imagination of policymakers, Wall Street, and the public. This has been particularly true in the realm of fintech credit where platform companies increasingly provide online loans to consumers, students, and small businesses by harnessing AI underwriting and alternative data. In 2019 alone fintech lenders represented nearly 50% of total non-credit card, unsecured consumer loan balances in the United States. One of the most prevalent ways fintech credit firms operate is by securitizing the online loans they help originate. …

Fiduciary Principles In Banking Law, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

When are banks fiduciaries of their customers and clients? This question is of more than theoretical interest given the organizational structure of modern financial institutions and the broad-ranging functions they perform. In this chapter of the Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law, I canvass fiduciary principles in banking law. I consider when fiduciary duties exist and what they require, the range of remedies available for breach, and the various techniques banks use to exclude or modify fiduciary duties. One puzzling feature of the legal landscape is that clients bring actions less often than banks’ size and conduct might suggest, which contributes …

Check Clearing And Voidable Preference Law Under The Bankruptcy Code, David G. Carlson

Articles

Every business practice must withstand the critique of federal voidable preference law. This article surveys how well check clearing system fares under this adjunct to the principle that unsecured creditors should share equally in a bankruptcy proceeding. Check clearing involves extending short-term credit by depositary banks to their customers. Banks routinely extend unsecured and secured credit. The fate of a bank in its customer's bankruptcy differs, depending on what kind of credit is extended. In the case of an overdraft, banks have preference risk, but they also have powerful defenses to muster against liability. In the case credit is advanced …

Consumer Bitcredit And Fintech Lending, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

The digital economy is changing everything, including how we borrow money. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, banks pulled back in their lending and, as a result, many consumers and small businesses found themselves unable to access credit. A wave of online firms called fintech lenders have filled the space left vacant by traditional financial institutions. These platforms are fast making antiques out of many mainstream lending practices, such as long paper applications and face-to-face meetings. Instead, through underwriting by automation — utilizing big data (including social media data) and machine learning — loan processing that once took days …

Regulating Robo Advice Across The Financial Services Industry, Tom Baker, Benedict G. C. Dellaert

All Faculty Scholarship

Automated financial product advisors – “robo advisors” – are emerging across the financial services industry, helping consumers choose investments, banking products, and insurance policies. Robo advisors have the potential to lower the cost and increase the quality and transparency of financial advice for consumers. But they also pose significant new challenges for regulators who are accustomed to assessing human intermediaries. A well-designed robo advisor will be honest and competent, and it will recommend only suitable products. Because humans design and implement robo advisors, however, honesty, competence, and suitability cannot simply be assumed. Moreover, robo advisors pose new scale risks that …

The New Investor, Tom C. W. Lin

UF Law Faculty Publications

A sea change is happening in finance. Machines appear to be on the rise and humans on the decline. Human endeavors have become unmanned endeavors. Human thought and human deliberation have been replaced by computerized analysis and mathematical models. Technological advances have made finance faster, larger, more global, more interconnected, and less human. Modern finance is becoming an industry in which the main players are no longer entirely human. Instead, the key players are now cyborgs: part machine, part human. Modern finance is transforming into what this Article calls cyborg finance.

This Article offers one of the first broad, descriptive, …

Implementing Dodd-Frank: A Review Of The Cftc‟S Rulemaking Process: Testimony, Michael Greenberger

Congressional Testimony

The Relationship of Unregulated OTC Derivatives to the Meltdown. It is now accepted wisdom that it was the non-transparent, poorly capitalized, and almost wholly unregulated over-the-counter (“OTC”) derivatives market that lit the fuse that exploded the highly vulnerable worldwide economy in the fall of 2008. Because tens of trillions of dollars of these financial products were pegged to the economic performance of an overheated and highly inflated housing market, the sudden collapse of that market triggered under-capitalized or non-capitalized OTC derivative guarantees of the subprime housing investments. Moreover, the many undercapitalized insurers of that collapsing market had other multi-trillion dollar …

The Role Of Derivatives In The Financial Crisis – Testimony Before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, June 30, 2010, Michael Greenberger

Congressional Testimony

It is now almost universally accepted that the unregulated multi-trillion dollar OTC CDS market helped foment a mortgage crisis, then a credit crisis, and finally a ―once-in-a-century systemic financial crisis that, but for huge U.S. taxpayer interventions, would have in the fall of 2008 led the world economy into a devastating Depression. Before explaining below the manner in which credit default swaps fomented this crisis, it worth citing in the margin those many economists, regulators, market observers, and financial columnists who have described the central role unregulated CDS played in the crisis.

Even those once skeptical of arguments about the …