Banking and Finance Law Commons^™

Shadowing Lenders And Consumers: The Rise, Regulation, And Risks Of Non-Banks, Shelby D. Green

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Since the financial crisis of 2008, “shadow banking” or financial transactions by “non-banks,” has skyrocketed. Non-banks are not depositary institutions and as such, they roam free, largely outside the purview of the bank regulators. They occupy all parts of the credit markets, from mortgage loan origination to payday lenders. Untethered, they operate without government guarantees, such as deposit insurance and have no access to emergency government lending facilities, such as the Federal Reserve's discount window.

There are both positives and negatives in the rise of non-banks. On the positive side is market liquidity and greater diversity of funding sources for …

Realizing The Recession: Modifying Dodd-Frank With A View To The Future, David E. Chaney

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Equity Crowdfunding Portals Should Join And Enhance The Crowd By Providing Venture Formation Resources, Jeff Thomas

Nova Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Avoidance Of Pre-Bankruptcy Transactions: An Economic And Comparative Approach, Aurelio Gurrea-Martinez

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Most insolvency jurisdictions provide several mechanisms to reverse transactions entered into by a debtor prior to the commencement of the bankruptcy procedure. These mechanisms, generally known as claw-back actions or avoidance provisions, may fulfil several economic goals. First, they act as an ex post alignment of incentives between factually insolvent debtors and their creditors, since the latter become the residual claimants of an insolvent firm but they do not have any control over the debtor´s assets while the company is not yet subject to a bankruptcy procedure. Thus, avoidance powers may prevent or, at least, reverse opportunistic behaviors faced by …

Proxy Access Voting: Evaluating Proxy Access And The Recent Phenomenon Of Corporations Adopting Shareholder Protective Policies, Danielle Vukovich

San Diego International Law Journal

Shareholders hold a financial stake in a corporation, and therefore are often viewed as owners of the corporation and believed to be in control for all corporate actions. However, their powers are circumscribed. Board of directors committees nominate directors to serve the corporation and these directors have the power to select the corporation’s officers. The committees provide shareholders a slate of proposed directors that are voted on and approved at the annual shareholder meeting. Shareholders may also propose their own slate of directors, but this typically requires a proxy contest, which can be expensive due to the costs both associated …

Whistleblowers—A Case Study In The Regulatory Cycle For Financial Services, Ronald H. Filler, Jerry W. Markham

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were directed by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank) to create whistleblower protection programs that reward informants with massive bounty payments. At the time of its passage, the Dodd-Frank Act was a highly controversial statute that was passed on partisan lines. Its whistleblowing authority was one of its “most contentious provisions.” As the result of the 2016 elections, the Dodd-Frank Act has come under renewed attack in Congress and by the new Trump administration. The stage is being set for possible repeal of …

Financing Green: Reforming Green Bond Regulation In The United States, Echo Kaixi Wang

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In recent years, green bonds have emerged as a way for the financial industry to contribute to environmentally friendly projects, combat climate change, and provide funds for green infrastructures across the world. While the green bond market has expanded drastically across large nations in Europe and Asia, market growth has stalled in the United States, in part due to a lack of promising regulations in the United States. Existing regulations on green bond issuance in the United States only exists in the form of non-binding international guidelines. This Note reviews the benefits and potentials of green bonds both as an …

Consumer Bitcredit And Fintech Lending, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

The digital economy is changing everything, including how we borrow money. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, banks pulled back in their lending and, as a result, many consumers and small businesses found themselves unable to access credit. A wave of online firms called fintech lenders have filled the space left vacant by traditional financial institutions. These platforms are fast making antiques out of many mainstream lending practices, such as long paper applications and face-to-face meetings. Instead, through underwriting by automation — utilizing big data (including social media data) and machine learning — loan processing that once took days …

What Would We Do Without Them: Whistleblowers In The Era Of Sarbanes-Oxley And Dodd-Frank, Sean Griffith, Jane A. Norberg, Ian Engoron, Alice Brightsky, Tracey Mcneil, Jennifer M. Pacella, Judith Weinstock, Jason Zuckerman

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

No abstract provided.

Regulating The “Too Big To Jail” Financial Institutions, Jerry W. Markham

Brooklyn Law Review

This article addresses the “too big to jail” regulatory model in which large banks pay hundreds of billions of dollars to settle multiple and duplicative regulatory charges brought by a horde of state, federal, and even foreign regulators. The banks pay those massive settlements in order to keep their banking charters and to obtain immunity from prosecution for senior executives. In turn, regulators benefit from the headlines these fines generate. Much criticism has been directed at these settlements because the banks are allowed to continue business as usual and no senior executives are jailed. Other critics contend that these settlements …

Opacity, Fragility, & Power: Lessons From The Law Enforcement Response To The Financial Crisis, Gregory M. Gilchrist

Brooklyn Law Review

Review of Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez, THE CARE FOR THE CORPORATE DEATH PENALTY: RESTORING LAW AND ORDER ON WALL STREET (New York 2017) The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty, by Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez, argues that the limited law enforcement response to the 2008 financial crisis represented an unprecedented failure of the rule of law. It further maintains that the weak response by law enforcement was caused by the economic and political power of the largest financial institutions and those who run them. It concludes that the failure to vigorously prosecute the people …

Informed Trading And Its Regulation, Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, Gabriel Rauterberg

Faculty Scholarship

Informed trading – trading on information not yet reflected in a stock’s price – drives the stock market. Such informational advantages can arise from astute analysis of varied pieces of public news, from just released public information, or from confidential information from inside a firm. We argue that these disparate types of trading are all better regulated as part of the broader phenomenon of informed trading. Informed trading makes share prices more accurate, enhancing the allocation of capital, but also makes markets less liquid, which is costly to the efficiency of trade. Informed trading thus poses a fundamental trade-off in …

Securitization Ten Years After The Financial Crisis: An Overview, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium issue examines securitization a decade after the 2008 financial crisis. Prior to the crisis, securitization was one of America’s dominant means of financing. Many observers, however, blamed securitization for causing the crisis, sparking regulation that arguably has been overly restrictive and, in some cases, even punitive. Where are we now?

Whistling Loud And Clear: Applying Chevron To Subsection 21f Of Dodd–Frank, Shaun M. Bennett

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Note addresses a circuit court split arising from a portion of the anti-retaliation provisions in the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Subsection 21F’s retaliation prohibitions apply to those employers whose employees make required or protected disclosures under the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) or any other rule or regulation under the SEC’s jurisdiction. SOX provides anti -retaliation protections — similar to those available under Dodd–Frank — for employees of publicly traded companies who report misconduct. However, SOX expressly affords protections to those who provide information to “a Federal regulatory or law enforcement agency; any Member of …

Canons Of Construction For Dysfunctional Statutes: A Comment On Bennett, Paul G. Mahoney

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Comment On Whistling Loud And Clear: Applying Chevron To Subsection 21f Of Dodd–Frank, Sarah C. Haan

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of Entrepreneurial Finance: A New Typology, J. Brad Bernthal

Publications

There has been an explosion in new types of startup finance instruments. Whereas twenty years ago preferred stock dominated the field, startup companies and investors now use at least eight different instruments—six of which have only become widely used in the last decade. Legal scholars have yet to reflect upon the proliferation of instrument types in the aggregate. Notably missing is a way to organize instruments into a common framework that highlights their similarities and differences.

This Article makes four contributions. First, it catalogues the variety of startup investment forms. I describe novel instruments, such as revenue-based financing, which remain …

The Commodification Of Cryptocurrency, Neil Tiwari

Michigan Law Review

Cryptocurrencies are digital tokens built on blockchain technology. This allows for a product that is fully decentralized, with no need for a third-party intermediary like a government or financial institution. Cryptocurrency creators use initial coin offerings (ICOs) to raise capital to build their tokens. Cryptocurrency ICOs are problematic because they do not fit neatly within either of two traditional categories—securities or commodities. Each of these categories has their own regulatory agency: the SEC for securities and the CFTC for commodities. At first blush, ICOs seem to be a sale of securities subject to regulation by the SEC, but this is …

How Investors Can (And Can't) Create Social Value, Paul Brest, Ronald J. Gilson, Mark A. Wolfson

Faculty Scholarship

Most investors throughout the world have a single goal: to earn the highest risk- adjusted financial returns. They would not accept a lower financial return from an investment that also produced social benefits.

More recently, an increasing number of socially-motivated investors have goals beyond maximizing returns. They also seek to align their investments with their social values (value alignment), and some also seek to cause the companies in which they invest to create more social value as a result of their investment (social value creation). We show in this essay that while it is relatively easy to achieve value alignment, …

The Weakening Of Fiduciary Law, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

In the 1970s and 80s, as major financial institutions grew and diversified their operations, courts and scholars recognized that fiduciary law posed profound challenges for the organizational practices of these firms. The challenges were considered existential by some: firms, ultimately, would need to slim down their operations, and perhaps even need to disaggregate some units, to avoid fiduciary liability. However, since these challenges were recognized, financial conglomerates have grown massively and focused more on taking direct stakes as principals, a practice that accentuates the risk of conflicts of interest.

How were financial conglomerates able to continue growing and diversifying despite …

The Price Of Law: The Case Of The Eurozone's Collective Action Clauses, Elena Carletti, Paolo Colla, Mitu Gulati, Steven Ongena

Faculty Scholarship

Do markets value contract protections? And does the quality of a legal system affect such valuations? To answer these questions we exploit a unique experiment whereby, after January 1, 2013, newly issued sovereign bonds of Eurozone countries under domestic law had to include Collective Action Clauses (CACs) specifying the minimum vote needed to modify payment terms. We find that CAC bonds trade at lower yields than otherwise similar no-CAC bonds; and that the quality of the legal system matters for this differential. Hence, markets appear to see CACs as providing protection against the legal risk embedded in domestic-law sovereign bonds.

The Hausmann-Gorky Effect, Mitu Gulati, Ugo Panizza

Faculty Scholarship

For over a century, legal scholars have debated the question of what to do about the debts incurred by despotic governments; asking whether successor non-despotic governments should have to pay them. That debate has gone nowhere. This paper examines whether an Op Ed written by Harvard economist, Ricardo Hausmann, in May 2017, may have shown an alternative path to the goal of increasing the cost of borrowing for despotic governments. Hausmann, in his Op Ed, had sought to produce a pricing penalty on the entire Venezuelan debt stock by trying to shame JPMorgan into removing Venezuelan bonds from its emerging …

Venture Capital Contract Design: An Empirical Analysis Of The Connection Between Bargaining Power And Venture Financing Contract Terms, Spencer Williams

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This Article presents an empirical analysis of the connection between bargaining power and contract design using an original dataset of over 5,500 equity and debt venture financings from 2004–2015. Using the total supply of venture capital in the U.S. as a measure of relative bargaining power between entrepreneurs and investors, this Article finds that venture capital supply has a statistically significant relationship with price and non-price terms in both equity and debt financings. These results contradict one of three theoretical accounts of bargaining power and support the other two.

A Novel Approach To Defining "Whistleblower" In Dodd-Frank, Ian A. Engoron

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

Following the Financial Crisis of 2008, trust in the financial industry was at an all-time low as the American taxpayer was forced to bailout the very same institutions responsible for their suffering. In response, Congress passed Dodd-Frank in 2010 to ensure another crisis like 2008 never happen again. Section 78u-6 of the Act provides incentives and protections for whistleblowers who report violations of securities laws. In recent years there has been a divide among circuit courts over the question of whether employees who report violations internally to their bosses—and not directly to the SEC—are protected by the Act. Currently, the …

Crowdfunding Signals, Darian M. Ibrahim

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Madden V. Midland Funding Llc: Uprooting The National Bank Act’S Power Of Preemption, Andrew Silvia

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

Leverage: State Enforcement Actions In The Wake Of The Robo-Sign Scandal, Raymond H. Brescia

Maine Law Review

In the fall of 2010, the revelations that tens of thousands of foreclosure filings across the nation were likely fraudulent—if not outright criminal—sparked a nation-wide investigation by all fifty state attorneys general to assess the extent of the scandal and its potential impacts, but also to consider likely legal and policy responses to such behavior. One of the tools at the state attorneys general’s disposal that might rein in this behavior includes each state’s Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices (UDAP) laws. Such laws typically prohibit “unfair” and “deceptive” practices, which are described loosely in these laws, and often give …

A Global Body And A Global Problem: The Curious Case Of The G-20 And Securities Regulation, Tamilla Nurizada

Cornell International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Tales From A Form Book: Stock Stories And Transactional Documents, Susan M. Chesler, Karen J. Sneddon

Montana Law Review

Tales from a Form Book: Stock Stories and Transactional Documents

The Perfect Storm Is Brewing Once Again: What Scaling Back Dodd-Frank Will Mean For The Credit Default Swap, Daniel Isaacson

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

The current presidential administration has expressed a concerted desire to “scale back” and even “get rid of” the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd–Frank). Focusing specifically on Dodd–Frank’s regulation of the credit default swap (CDS), this Article explores two timely queries. First, whether Dodd–Frank’s regulatory response to these financial instruments is a justifiable one, and second, what effect a repeal may have. This Article will show that the “perfect storm” CDS—which contributed so significantly to the 2007–2010 financial crisis—flourished in a regulatory environment that contained two key weaknesses: (1) few restrictions on excessive speculation; and (2) the …