Law Commons^™

An Evolving Foreclosure Landscape: The Ibanez Case And Beyond, Peter R. Pitegoff, Laura S. Underkuffler

Faculty Publications

Mortgage securitization, subprime lending, a persistently weak housing market, and an explosion of residential mortgage defaults – today’s homeowners and banks face a new and challenging landscape. Recently, courts in several states have issued decisions that alter the terrain for mortgage foreclosures. In Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York, among other states, courts have dismissed foreclosure actions on the basis of what might seem to be highly technical deficiencies in the pleading or proof. The most well-known–and controversial–in this cluster of cases is U.S. Bank National Ass’n v. Ibanez, decided by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts this year. In …

Pay For Banker Performance: Structuring Executive Compensation For Risk Regulation, Frederick Tung

Faculty Scholarship

Excessive risk taking by firm managers did not originate with the Financial Crisis of 2007-08. Though bankers had special incentives to take big risks in the period before the Crisis, the incentive effects of equity-based compensation have been understood for some time. Among other things, equity compensation tends to induce greater risk taking by aligning managers’ risk preferences with those of equity holders. Longstanding government guaranties of bank liabilities additionally served to intensify bankers’ risk taking incentives.

I propose to ameliorate this gambler’s incentive with a new approach to compensation at the largest banks, one that explicitly accounts for the …

Ability To Pay, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

The landmark Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 ("Dodd-Frank") transforms the regulation of consumer credit in the United States. Many of its changes have been high-profile, attracting considerable media and scholarly attention, most notably the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ("CFPB"). Even specific consumer reforms, such as a so-called "plain vanilla" proposal, drew hot debate and lobbying firepower. But when the dust settled, one profoundly transformative innovation that did not garner the same outrage as plain vanilla or the CFPB did get into the law: imposing upon lenders a duty to assure a borrower's ability to repay. Ensuring a borrower's …