Banking and Finance Law Commons^™

Myths About Shareholder Value, Faith Stevelman

Articles & Chapters

The concept of unitary "shareholder value" and its reflection in nearterm stock prices formed the centrepiece of contemporary corporate governance up to the 2008 financial crisis. The crisis has elicited both more critical and clearer, book-length accounts of the relationship of law, corporate governance and finance. The concepts analysed in Lynn Stout's The Shareholder Value Myth are considered herein, as part of a commentary on the continuing evolution of academic corporate law and governance.

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 …

Hedge Funds And The Financial Crisis, Houman B. Shadab

Articles & Chapters

The performance of hedge funds during the financial crisis suggests that wide-ranging financial regulation is not always necessary to advance investor protection and financial stability. While 2008 was a year of record hedge fund losses and investor withdrawals that came about in part because many hedge fund managers failed to adequately respond to the financial crisis, the hedge fund industry significantly outperformed the heavily regulated mutual fund sector and, unlike the banking industry, was never in jeopardy of collapsing. Hedge funds did not cause or meaningfully exacerbate the financial crisis and in fact have reduced its impact and are helping …