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Full-Text Articles in Law
Informed Trading And Cybersecurity Breaches, Joshua Mitts, Eric L. Talley
Informed Trading And Cybersecurity Breaches, Joshua Mitts, Eric L. Talley
Faculty Scholarship
Cybersecurity has become a significant concern in corporate and commercial settings, and for good reason: a threatened or realized cybersecurity breach can materially affect firm value for capital investors. This paper explores whether market arbitrageurs appear systematically to exploit advance knowledge of such vulnerabilities. We make use of a novel data set tracking cybersecurity breach announcements among public companies to study trading patterns in the derivatives market preceding the announcement of a breach. Using a matched sample of unaffected control firms, we find significant trading abnormalities for hacked targets, measured in terms of both open interest and volume. Our results …
Third-Party Litigation Funding And The Dodd-Frank Act, Victoria Sahani
Third-Party Litigation Funding And The Dodd-Frank Act, Victoria Sahani
Faculty Scholarship
This article questions whether the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank Act”) should apply to the growing phenomenon of third-party litigation funding, in which outside entities invest in litigation or arbitration for profit. Currently, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom lightly regulate third-party litigation funding, but the majority of the day-to-day oversight comes through voluntary funder self-regulation. Most third-party funders of commercial disputes are private hedge funds that are subject to the securities regulations of the jurisdictions in which they operate. The Dodd-Frank Act is a relatively new statute in the United States that regulates …
Rolling Back The Repo Safe Harbors, Edward R. Morrison, Mark J. Roe, Christopher S. Sontchi
Rolling Back The Repo Safe Harbors, Edward R. Morrison, Mark J. Roe, Christopher S. Sontchi
Faculty Scholarship
Recent decades have seen substantial expansion in exemptions from the Bankruptcy Code's normal operation for repurchase agreements. These repos, which are equivalent to very short-term (often one-day) secured loans, are exempt from core bankruptcy rules such as the automatic stay that enjoins debt collection, rules against prebankruptcy fraudulent transfers, and rules against eve-of-bankruptcy preferential payment to favored creditors over other creditors. While these exemptions can be justified for United States Treasury securities and similarly liquid obligations backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government, they are not justified for mortgage-backed securities and other securities that could …
Breaking Bankruptcy Priority: How Rent-Seeking Upends The Creditors' Bargain, Frederick Tung, Mark J. Roe
Breaking Bankruptcy Priority: How Rent-Seeking Upends The Creditors' Bargain, Frederick Tung, Mark J. Roe
Faculty Scholarship
Bankruptcy reallocates value in a faltering firm. The bankruptcy apparatus eliminates some claims and alters others, leaving a reduced set of claims to match the firm’s diminished capacity to pay. This restructuring is done according to statutory and agreed-to contractual priorities, so that lower-ranking claims are eliminated first and higher ranking ones are preserved to the extent possible. Bankruptcy scholarship has long conceptualized this reallocation as a hypothetical bargain among creditors: creditors agree in advance that if the firm falters, value will be reallocated according to a fixed set of predetermined rules and contracts. In any given reorganization case, creditors …
Diversifying Clearinghouse Ownership In Order To Safeguard Free And Open Access To The Derivatives Clearing Market, Michael Greenberger
Diversifying Clearinghouse Ownership In Order To Safeguard Free And Open Access To The Derivatives Clearing Market, Michael Greenberger
Faculty Scholarship
Implementing the rigorous governance and ownership standards established in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act3 for derivatives clearing organizations (DCOs) will promote free and open access to clearing and reduce systemic risk within what is now the $700 trillion notional value derivatives market. Such standards are central to and advance the key regulatory tenants of Dodd-Frank: i.e., to restore transparency, capital adequacy, and accountability to what was the unregulated over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market by ensuring that swaps are cleared through financially sound DCOs. Also, these rules will promote competition by curtailing large swap dealers‘ (SDs) control …
The Extraterritorial Provisions Of The Dodd-Frank Act Protects U.S. Taxpayers From Worldwide Bailouts, Michael Greenberger
The Extraterritorial Provisions Of The Dodd-Frank Act Protects U.S. Taxpayers From Worldwide Bailouts, Michael Greenberger
Faculty Scholarship
The significant extraterritorial scope of the derivatives regulation within the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act promises to foster rigorous international standards for financial regulation that will restore transparency and stability to the global derivatives market. At present, that market exceeds $700 trillion notional value, or over ten times the world GDP. Despite opposition from Wall Street to the present extraterritorial application of almost all of Dodd-Frank’s derivatives regulation, the plain language of the statute requires implementing that regulation on an appropriate extraterritorial basis in order to protect U.S. taxpayers from bailing out financial institutions engaging in foreign …
Governing Systemic Risk: Towards A Governance Structure For Derivatives Clearhouses, Sean J. Griffith
Governing Systemic Risk: Towards A Governance Structure For Derivatives Clearhouses, Sean J. Griffith
Faculty Scholarship
Derivatives transactions create systemic risk by threatening to spread the consequences of default throughout the financial system. Responding to the manifestations of systemic risk exhibited in the financial crisis, policy-makers have sought to solve the problem by requiring as many derivatives transactions as possible to be “cleared” (essentially guaranteed) by a clearinghouse. The clearinghouse will centralize and, through the creation of reserve accounts, seek to contain systemic risk by preventing the consequences of default from spreading. This centralization of risk makes the clearinghouse the new locus of systemic risk, and the question of systemic risk management thus becomes a question …
Reforming Derivative Taxation, Alex Raskolnikov
Reforming Derivative Taxation, Alex Raskolnikov
Faculty Scholarship
This brief essay outlines three benchmarks for evaluating alternative ways of taxing capital income, summarizes anticipatory, retroactive, and accrual-based proposals for reforming the taxation of derivatives, and offers guidelines for evaluating more limited reforms. It is intended as an introduction to key concepts, tensions, and ideas for reforming the taxation of financial instruments.
Overwhelming A Financial Regulatory Black Hole With Legislative Sunlight: Dodd-Frank’S Attack On Systemic Economic Destabilization Caused By An Unregulated Multi-Trillion Dollar Derivatives Market, Michael Greenberger
Faculty Scholarship
It is now accepted wisdom that it was the non-transparent, poorly capitalized and almost wholly unregulated over-the-counter (“OTC”) derivatives market that lit the fuse that exploded the highly vulnerable worldwide economy in the fall of 2008.[1] Because tens of trillions of dollars of these financial products were pegged to the economic performance of an overheated and highly inflated housing market, the sudden collapse of that market triggered under-capitalized OTC derivative guarantees of the subprime housing market; and the guarantors’ multi-trillion dollar interconnectedness with thousands of other OTC derivatives’ counterparties within that OTC market (through interest rate, currency, foreign exchange, and …
Will The Cftc Defy Congress's Mandate To Stop Excessive Speculation In Commodity Markets And Aid And Abet Hyperinflation In World Food And Energy Prices: Analysis Of The Cftc's Proposed Rules On Speculative Position Limits, Michael Greenberger
Faculty Scholarship
On January 26, 2011, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Position Limits for Derivatives pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The proposed rules are designed to implement the historic Congressional mandate of the Commodity Exchange Act, as amended by Section 737 of the Dodd-Frank Act, to ban excessive speculation from the derivatives market, i.e., the speculation which exceeds the need for liquidity by commercial handlers hedging price risk in these markets. Section 737 is the result of multi-year consideration by Congress, during which a strong consensus was reached …
Taxation Of Financial Products: Options For Fundamental Reform, Alex Raskolnikov
Taxation Of Financial Products: Options For Fundamental Reform, Alex Raskolnikov
Faculty Scholarship
The following is testimony to the joint hearing of the House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Committee on Finance. The testimony discusses three benchmarks for evaluating the taxation of capital income in general and financial instruments in particular, summarizes three broad-based approaches to reforming the tax treatment of financial products, evaluates the impact of other fundamental reforms on the urgency of reforming the taxation of derivatives, and urges Congress to encourage the IRS to make detailed tax return data available for empirical research of revenue costs and other losses arising from derivatives-based tax planning.
Deconstructing Equity: Public Ownership, Agency Costs, And Complete Capital Markets, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles K. Whitehead
Deconstructing Equity: Public Ownership, Agency Costs, And Complete Capital Markets, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles K. Whitehead
Faculty Scholarship
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 signficantly. 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 …