Law Commons^™

The Volcker Rule And Evolving Financial Markets, Charles K. Whitehead

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Volcker Rule prohibits proprietary trading by banking entities - in effect, reintroducing to the financial markets a substantial portion of the Glass-Steagall Act’s static divide between banks and securities firms. This Article argues that the Glass-Steagall model is a fixture of the past - a financial Maginot Line within an evolving financial system. To be effective, new financial regulation must reflect new relationships in the marketplace. For the Volcker Rule, those relationships include a growing reliance by banks on new market participants to conduct traditional banking functions.

Proprietary trading has moved to less-regulated businesses, in many cases, to hedge …

The Limits Of Eu Hedge Fund Regulation, Dan Awrey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article examines the mechanics of the recently adopted EU Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive. On balance, the results of this examination are not encouraging. The EU has failed to mount a persuasive case for why the Directive represents an improvement over existing national regulatory regimes or prevailing market practices in several key areas. Furthermore, by attempting to shoehorn an economically, strategically and operationally diverse population of financial institutions into a single, artificial class of regulated actors, the EU has established what is in many respects a conceptually muddled regulatory regime. Most importantly, however, the Directive's approach toward the amelioration …