Securities Law Commons^™

Market Collaboration: Finance, Culture, And Ethnography After Neoliberalism, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

In the wake of the disasters of March 2011, financial regulators and financial-risk management experts in Japan expressed little hope that much could be done nor did they take great interest in defining possible policy interventions. This curious response to regulatory crisis coincided with a new fascination with culturalist explanations of financial markets, on the one hand, and a resort to what I term “data politics”—a politics of intensified data collection—on the other. In this article, I analyze these developments as being exemplary of a new regulatory moment characterized by a loss of faith in both free market regulation and …

The Quiet Metamorphosis: How Derivatives Changed The "Business Of Banking", Saule T. Omarova

Saule T. Omarova

In the wake of an unprecedented global financial crisis, one of the fundamental questions preoccupying policymakers and students of financial regulation worldwide is "How did we get here?" This Article uncovers and analyzes an important part of our recent regulatory history, which provides a key to understanding some of the deeper, hidden causes of the crisis but whose significance legal scholars have so far failed to appreciate. The Article examines interpretive letters issued by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the primary regulator of federally chartered U.S. banks, interpreting the National Bank Act of 1863 to allow …

Paying Paul And Robbing No One: An Eminent Domain Solution For Underwater Mortgage Debt, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

In the view of many analysts, the best way to assist “underwater” homeowners — those who owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth — is to reduce the principal on their home loans. Yet in the case of privately securitized mortgages, such write-downs are almost impossible to carry out, since loan modifications on the scale necessitated by the housing market crash would require collective action by a multitude of geographically dispersed security holders. The solution, this study suggests, is for state and municipal governments to use their eminent domain powers to buy up and restructure underwater mortgages, …

The Macroprudential Turn: From Institutional “Safety And Soundness” To “Systemic Stability” In Financial Supervision, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

This Working Paper is no longer available. The published version of this article is available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/1405/ Since the global financial dramas of 2008-09, authorities on financial regulation have come increasingly to counsel the inclusion of macroprudential policy instruments in the standard ‘toolkit’ of finance-regulatory measures employed by financial supervisors. The hallmark of this perspective is its focus not simply on the safety and soundness of individual financial institutions, as is characteristic of the traditional ‘microprudential’ perspective, but also on certain structural features of financial systems that can imperil such systems as wholes. Systemic ‘financial stability’ thus comes to supplement, …

Halliburton, Basic And Fraud On The Market: The Need For A New Paradigm, Charles W. Murdock

Charles W. Murdock

Summary: Halliburton, Basic and Fraud on the Market: The Need for a New Paradigm

If defrauded securities plaintiffs cannot bring a class-action lawsuit, there often will be no effective remedy since the amount at stake for individual plaintiffs is not sufficient to warrant the substantial costs of litigation. To surmount the problem of individualized reliance and establish commonality, federal courts for twenty-five years have been employing the Basic fraud-on-the-market theory which posits that, in an efficient market, investors rely on the integrity of the market price.

While class certification at one time was a matter of course, today it is …

Limits Of Disclosure, Steven M. Davidoff, Claire A. Hill

Steven Davidoff Solomon

One big focus of attention, criticism, and proposals for reform in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has been securities disclosure. Many commentators have emphasized the complexity of the securities being sold, arguing that no one could understand the disclosure. Some observers have noted that disclosures were sometimes false or incomplete. What follows these issues, to some commentators, is that, whatever other lessons we may learn from the crisis, we need to improve disclosure. How should it be improved? Commentators often lament the frailties of human understanding, notably including those of everyday retail investors—people who do not understand or …

Regulation A+ And The Question Of State Blue Sky Law Preemption Under The J.O.B.S. Act, Neal Newman

Neal F. Newman

No abstract provided.

Understanding The 2012 Master Securities Forward Transaction Agreement, Christian Johnson, Ranada Fergerson

Christian A. Johnson

Gambling On Our Financial Future: How The Federal Government Fiddles While State Common Law Is A Safer Bet To Prevent Another Financial Collapse, Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

Remic Tax Enforcement As Financial-Market Regulator, Bradley T. Borden, David J. Reiss

David J Reiss

Lawmakers, prosecutors, homeowners, policymakers, investors, news media, scholars and other commentators have examined, litigated, and reported on numerous aspects of the 2008 Financial Crisis and the role that residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) played in that crisis. Big banks create RMBS by pooling mortgage notes into trusts and selling interests in those trusts as RMBS. Absent from prior work related to RMBS securitization is the tax treatment of RMBS mortgage-note pools and the critical role tax enforcement should play in ensuring the integrity of mortgage-note securitization.

This Article is the first to examine federal tax aspects of RMBS mortgage-note pools formed …