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Full-Text Articles in Securities Law
Markets, Systemic Risk, And The Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Steven L. Schwarcz
Markets, Systemic Risk, And The Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
The recent subprime mortgage meltdown is undermining financial market stability and has the potential to cause a true systemic breakdown, collapsing the world's financial systems like a row of dominoes. This essay uses the subprime crisis to demonstrate that existing protections against systemic risk, which focus on banks and largely ignore financial markets, are anachronistic and misguided. Because companies increasingly access financial markets without going through banks, an effective framework for containing systemic risk must focus on markets.
Deconstructing Equity: Public Ownership, Agency Costs, And Complete Capital Markets, Charles K. Whitehead, Ronald J. Gilson
Deconstructing Equity: Public Ownership, Agency Costs, And Complete Capital Markets, Charles K. Whitehead, Ronald J. Gilson
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
The traditional law and finance focus on agency costs presumes that the premise that diversified public shareholders are the cheapest risk bearers is immutable. In this Essay, we raise the possibility that changes in the capital markets have called this premise into question, drawn into sharp relief by the recent private equity wave in which the size and range of public companies being taken private expanded significantly. In brief, we argue that private owners, in increasingly complete markets, can transfer risk in discrete slices to counterparties who, in turn, can manage or otherwise diversify away those risks they choose to …