Law Commons^™

Leveraged Etfs: The Trojan Horse Has Passed The Margin-Rule Gates, William M. Humphries

Seattle University Law Review

What do the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the demise of Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns all have in common? One word: leverage. The misuse of leverage, in all its forms, contributed greatly to all of these events. Yet even today, common investors can purchase a leveraged exchange-traded fund (leveraged ETF), a complex product that uses leverage to increase returns, without triggering applicable laws designed to regulate the use of leverage. This Comment articulates the basics surrounding the functions and operations of leveraged ETFs and margin rules in order to assess the compatibility of the two. The Comment argues …

Otc Derivatives Trading Under The Financial Reform Bill: Is It Tough Enough?, Willa E. Gibson

Willa E Gibson

This paper discusses the regulatory framework devised by Congress to govern trading in OTC derivatives products with a goal toward assessing the efficiency of the legislation to prevent systemic loss in the financial markets from derivatives trading. Both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate have drafted financial reform legislation prompted by the financial market failings the country experienced in 2008. Both versions provide for comprehensive regulation of the OTC derivatives products, which were used extensively by those financial institutions that lost millions of dollars from investments in mortgage securities to insure against subprime mortgage defaults. This paper …

The Jumbled Alphabet Soup Of The Collapsed Home Mortgage Market: Abcp, Cdo, Cds And Rmbs, Georgette Chapman Phillips

University of Miami Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Narrowing The Bankruptcy Safe Harbor For Derivatives To Combat Systemic Risk, Bryan G. Faubus

Duke Law Journal

Bankruptcy law establishes proceedings designed to rehabilitate debtors while protecting creditors, but a series of safe harbors effectively exempts from bankruptcy proceedings certain financial contracts known as derivatives. Accordingly, when a party to a derivative contract goes bankrupt, the counterparty may terminate the contract and seize what it is owed from the debtor's assets. Congress enacted these safe harbors to combat the risk of systemic failure by maintaining liquidity in troubled markets; in doing so, however, they allowed counterparties to engage in opportunistic behavior and inefficiently consume a debtor's limited assets. Because these two consequences may harm the debtor and …

Guilty By Association? Regulating Credit Default Swaps, Houman B. Shadab

Articles & Chapters

A wide range of U.S. policymakers initiated a series of actions in 2008 and 2009 to bring greater regulation and oversight to credit default swaps (CDSs) and other over-the-counter derivatives. The policymakers’ stated motivations echoed widely expressed criticisms of the regulation, characteristics, and practices of the CDS market, and focused on the risks of the instruments and the lack of public transparency over their utilization and execution. Certainly, the misuse of certain CDSs enabled mortgage-related security risk to become overconcentrated in some financial institutions.

Yet as the analysis in this Article suggests, failing to distinguish between CDS derivatives and the …

Counterparty Regulation And Its Limits: The Evolution Of The Credit Default Swaps Market, Houman B. Shadab

Articles & Chapters

Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives are widely regarded as “unregulated” financial instruments. While it is true that OTC derivatives are subject to relatively minimal federal regulation, OTC derivatives are in fact subject to a robust form of control and governance in the form of counterparty regulation. Counterparty regulation arises when two or more parties are continually exposed to counterparty credit risk for the duration of a long-term contract, and it consists of specific governance mechanisms such as the daily adjustment of collateral and the netting out of redundant trades. Counterparty regulation governs derivatives transactions but not securities transactions.

This essay reviews recent …

Insurance Perspectives On Federal Financial Regulatory Reform: Addressing Misunderstandings And Providing A View From A Different Paradigm, Jeffrey E. Thomas

Villanova Law Review

The article discusses the insurance regulation in the U.S. and its role in the financial crisis. It states that the collapse of American International Group (AIG) was not an insurance regulatory failure. It describes the scope and approach to state insurance regulation and the development and functioning of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC). The role played by the courts in insurance regulation is also addressed.