Securities Law Commons^™

Dictation And Delegation In Securities Regulation, Usha Rodrigues

Indiana Law Journal

When Congress undertakes major financial reform, either it dictates the precise con-tours of the law itself or it delegates the bulk of the rule making to an administrative agency. This choice has critical consequences. Making the law self-executing in federal legislation is swift, not subject to administrative tinkering, and less vulnerable than rule making to judicial second-guessing. Agency action is, in contrast, deliberate, subject to ongoing bureaucratic fiddling, and more vulnerable than statutes to judicial challenge.

This Article offers the first empirical analysis of the extent of congressional delegation in securities law from 1970 to the present day, examining nine …

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 …