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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Federal Reserve As Collateral's Last Resort, Colleen M. Baker
The Federal Reserve As Collateral's Last Resort, Colleen M. Baker
Notre Dame Law Review
This Essay is the first step in a broader normative project analyzing the proper balance between legislation and central bank policy—between architecture and implementation—in shaping the Federal Reserve’s collateral framework to best promote market discipline and to minimize credit allocation. Its modest aim is twofold. First, it provides the first analysis of central bank collateral frameworks in the legal scholarship. Second, it analyzes the equilibrium between legislation and central bank policy in the Federal Reserve’s collateral framework in the context of its section 13(3) emergency liquidity authority, lending authority for designated financial market utilities, and swap lines with foreign central …
Is The Federal Reserve Constitutional? An Originalist Argument For Independent Agencies, Christine Kexel Chabot
Is The Federal Reserve Constitutional? An Originalist Argument For Independent Agencies, Christine Kexel Chabot
Notre Dame Law Review
Originalists have written off the Federal Reserve’s independent monetary policy decisions as an unconstitutional novelty. This Article demonstrates that the independent structure of the Federal Reserve dates back to a Founding-era agency known as the Sinking Fund Commission. Like the Federal Reserve, the Commission conducted open market purchases of U.S. securities with substantial independence from the President. The Commission’s independent structure was proposed by Alexander Hamilton, passed by the First Congress, and signed into law by President George Washington. Their decisions to create an independent Commission with multiple members to check the President and one another—and to include the Vice …
Beyond Bankruptcy: Resolution As A Macroprudential Regulatory Tool, Steven L. Schwarcz
Beyond Bankruptcy: Resolution As A Macroprudential Regulatory Tool, Steven L. Schwarcz
Notre Dame Law Review
Postcrisis efforts to extend bankruptcy-resolution techniques to protect the stability of the financial system have been insufficient, in part because regulators have been conflating bankruptcy’s traditional goals of resolving troubled firms individually with the need to resolve critical elements of the financial system to ensure its continued operation as a “system.” This requires resolving troubled firms collectively, as well as resolving securities-trading markets and the infrastructure that serves to facilitate that trading. The Article examines how to design that regulation, differentiating three approaches: reactive regulation, which comprises variations on traditional bankruptcy; proactive regulation, which consists of preplanned enhancements that are …
Regulating Complacency: Human Limitations And Legal Efficacy, Steven L. Schwarcz
Regulating Complacency: Human Limitations And Legal Efficacy, Steven L. Schwarcz
Notre Dame Law Review
This Article examines how insights into limited human rationality can improve financial regulation. The Article identifies four categories of limitations—herd behavior, cognitive biases, overreliance on heuristics, and a proclivity to panic—that undermine the perfect-market regulatory assumptions that parties have full information and will act in their rational self-interest. The Article then analyzes how insights into these limitations can be used to correct resulting market failures. Requiring more robust disclosure and due diligence, for example, can help to reduce reliance on misleading information cascades that motivate herd behavior. Debiasing through law, such as requiring more specific, poignant, and concrete disclosure of …
A Textual Analysis Of Whistleblower Protections Under The Dodd-Frank Act, Brent T. Murphy
A Textual Analysis Of Whistleblower Protections Under The Dodd-Frank Act, Brent T. Murphy
Notre Dame Law Review
This Note endorses the reasoning of the Fifth Circuit in Asadi v. G.E. Energy (USA), L.L.C., and argues that the plain language of Dodd-Frank limits its whistleblower protections to individuals who provide information to the SEC. This Note argues that the reasoning of the Second Circuit in Berman v. Neo@Ogilvy LLC relying on the Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Burwell is inapposite, and that the Second Circuit introduced ambiguity where no ambiguity previously existed and improperly extended Chevron deference to the SEC.
A Framework For Bailout Regulation, Anthony J. Casey, Eric A. Posner
A Framework For Bailout Regulation, Anthony J. Casey, Eric A. Posner
Notre Dame Law Review
During the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, the government bailed out numerous corporations, including banks, investment banks, and automobile manufacturers. While the bailouts helped end the financial crisis, they were intensely controversial at the time, and were marred by the ad hoc, politicized quality of the government intervention. We examine the bailouts from the financial crisis as well as earlier bailouts to determine what policy considerations best justify them, and how they are best designed. The major considerations in bailing out and structuring the bailout of a firm are the macroeconomic impact of failure; the moral …
Incorporating Legal Claims, Maya Steinitz
Incorporating Legal Claims, Maya Steinitz
Notre Dame Law Review
Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in commercial litigation funding. Whereas the judicial, legislative, and scholarly treatment of litigation finance has regarded litigation finance first and foremost as a form of champerty and sought to regulate it through rules of legal professional responsibility (hereinafter, the “legal ethics paradigm”), this Article suggests that the problems created by litigation finance are all facets of the classic problems created by “the separation of ownership and control” that have been a focus of business law since the advent of the corporate form. Therefore, an “incorporation paradigm,” offered here, is more appropriate. “Incorporating …
Market Power Without Market Definition, Daniel A. Crane
Market Power Without Market Definition, Daniel A. Crane
Notre Dame Law Review
Antitrust law has traditionally required proof of market power in most cases and has analyzed market power through a market definition/market share lens. In recent years, this indirect or structural approach to proving market power has come under attack as misguided in practice and intellectually incoherent. If market definition collapses in the courts and antitrust agencies, as it seems poised to do, this will rupture antitrust analysis and create urgent pressures for an alternative approach to proving market power through direct evidence. None of the leading theoretic approaches—such as the Lerner Index or a search for supracompetitive profits—provides a robust …
The Governance Structure Of Shadow Banking: Rethinking Assumptions About Limited Liability, Steven L. Schwarcz
The Governance Structure Of Shadow Banking: Rethinking Assumptions About Limited Liability, Steven L. Schwarcz
Notre Dame Law Review
In an earlier article, I argued that shadow banking—the provision of financial services and products outside of the traditional banking system, and thus without the need for bank intermediation between capital markets and the users of funds—is so radically transforming finance that regulatory scholars need to rethink their basic assumptions. This Article attempts to rethink the corporate governance assumption that owners of firms should always have their liability limited to the capital they have invested. In the relatively small and decentralized firms that dominate shadow banking, equity investors tend to be active managers. Limited liability gives these investor-managers strong incentives …
Banking And The Social Contract, Mehrsa Baradaran
Banking And The Social Contract, Mehrsa Baradaran
Notre Dame Law Review
This Article asserts that there are three major tenets of the social contract: (1) safety and soundness, (2) consumer protection, and (3) access to credit. Regulators can and should require banks to meet standards in these areas to benefit society even if these measures reasonably reduce bank profits. Implicit in the social contract is the idea that each party must give up something in the exchange. This Article provides policymakers not only the appropriate narrative and justifications needed to frame their regulatory philosophy, but it also provides important textual support from the most prominent acts of banking legislation to give …