Banking and Finance Law Commons^™

The Art Of A Loan: “When The Loan Sharks Meet Damien Hirst’S ‘$12-Million Stuffed Shark’”, Valerie Medelyan

Pace Law Review

Part I of this Article introduces the reader to the typical types of loans that banks make, includes an in-depth description of a secured loan, and finishes with a discussion of the due diligence requirements of banks. Part II identifies the unique complexities posed by art when it is used as collateral, comparing and contrasting the banks’ process when approving a loan secured by commonly-used assets versus a loan secured by art. Part III discusses the banks’ growing willingness to approve art-backed loans, and identifies the safeguards built into such deals. Part IV introduces the sub-prime lenders of the art …

Can Banks Be Liable For Aiding And Abetting Terrorism?: A Closer Look Into The Split On Secondary Liability Under The Antiterrorism Act, Alison Bitterly

Fordham Law Review

    The Antiterrorism Act of 1990 (ATA) explicitly authorizes a private cause of action for U.S. nationals who suffer an injury “by reason of an act of international terrorism.” ATA civil litigation has increased dramatically following September 11, 2001—and banks, because of their deep pockets, have emerged as an increasingly popular target. Courts are divided concerning the scope of liability under the statute, specifically over whether the ATA authorizes a cause of action premised on secondary liability. Under a secondary liability theory, a plaintiff could argue that a bank, through providing financial services to a terrorist client, aided and abetted an …

Plaintiffs Carry Heavy Burden In Terror Suits Against Banks, Jimmy Gurulé

Journal Articles

Plaintiffs have a heavy burden to prove that the provision of routine financial services to suspected terrorists violated the ATA. While plaintiffs clearly met their burden in the Arab Bank case, that case did not involve the provision of routine banking services. Further, in the Palestinian Authority case several of the individuals who committed the terrorist attacks worked for the authority and were monetarily rewarded for their acts of terrorism.

Plaintiffs' lawyers in pending bank cases filed under the ATA therefore should be hesitant to read too much into the Arab Bank and Palestinian Authority verdicts.

Super-Liens To The Rescue? A Case Against Special Districts In Real Estate Finance, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

In a time of limited resources and sluggish economic growth, competition between cities has become palpable, and the race for new investment often dictates the public agenda. To that end, the explosive growth of public-private partnerships between local governments and private investors has resulted in the creation of a myriad of special taxing districts, the purposes of which are limited only by the imagination. Of particular concern has been the growth of certain real estate development-related districts. Although first conceived to fund critical improvements where conventional credit was not available, in more recently years these special districts have been used …

Accountability And Independence In Financial Regulation: Checks And Balances, Public Engagement, And Other Innovations, Michael S. Barr

Articles

Financial regulation attempts to balance two competing administrative goals. On the one hand, as with much of administrative law, accountability is a core goal. Accountability undergirds the democratic legitimacy of administrative agencies. On the other hand, unlike with much of administrative law, independence plays a critical role.' Independence helps to protect financial regulatory agencies from political interference and-with some important caveats-arguably helps to guard against some forms of industry capture. In addition, with respect to the Federal Reserve (the Fed), independence serves to improve the credibility of the Fed's price stability mandate by insulating its decisionmaking from politics and, in …

Reframing International Financial Regulation After The Global Financial Crisis: Rational States And Interdependence, Not Regulatory Networks And Soft Law, Matthew C. Turk

Michigan Journal of International Law

The British bank Northern Rock failed on September 14, 2007; U.S. investment bank Bear Stearns collapsed on March 17, 2008 and was subject to a government-engineered takeover by J.P. Morgan Chase; and, on the night of September 15, 2008, U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and sent global financial markets into disarray the following Monday morning. These financial institutions shared several features in common prior to their downfall, but perhaps the most curious is that they were each considered fully compliant with the second generation framework for the Basel Accords on Capital Adequacy (Basel II), an international agreement …

Libor: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know But Were Afraid To Ask, Michael R. Koblenz, Kenneth M. Labbate, Carrie C. Turner

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

The goal of this article is to present the reader with a general overview of the LIBOR: its genesis and development, how and why London bankers manipulated the LIBOR, the liability of implicated parties, criminal penalties, the impact of criminal penalties on director and officer insurance carriers, and what the future holds for the LIBOR.

The Systemic Risk Paradox: Banks And Clearinghouses Under Regulation, Felix B. Chang

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Consolidation in the financial industry threatens competition and increases systemic risk. Recently, banks have seen both high-profile mergers and spectacular failures, prompting a flurry of regulatory responses. Yet consolidation has not been as closely scrutinized for clearinghouses, which facilitate trading in securities and derivatives products. These nonbank intermediaries can be thought of as middlemen who collect deposits to ensure that each buyer and seller has the wherewithal to uphold its end of the deal. Clearinghouses mitigate the credit risks that buyers and sellers would face if they dealt directly with each other.

Yet here lies the dilemma: large clearinghouses reduce …

Banking And The Social Contract, Mehrsa Baradaran

Scholarly Works

This article asserts that there exists today and has always existed an interdependent relationship between banks and the state. I refer to this connection and its mutual benefits and responsibilities as a social contract. When Alexander Hamilton responded to President Washington’s inquiry about the advisability of a national bank, he wrote that “such a Bank is not a mere matter of private property, but a political machine of the greatest importance to the State.” This social contract has existed since the inception of banking in the United States and has been reinforced over time, but it has recently become weakened …

Who's In Charge Of Global Finance?, Michael S. Barr

Articles

The global financial crisis caused widespread harm not just to the financial system, but also to millions of households and businesses and to the global economy. The crisis revealed substantive, fundamental weaknesses in global financial regulation and raised serious questions about whether national regulators and the international financial regulatory system could ever be up to the task of overseeing global finance. This Article analyzes post-crisis reforms with two questions in mind: First, how can we build an effective international financial architecture with more than one architect? Second, can we build a system that is legitimate and accountable? The Article suggests …

Reverse Regulatory Arbitrage: An Auction Approach To Regulatory Assignments, M Todd Henderson, Fred Tung

Faculty Scholarship

In the years before the Financial Crisis, banks got to pick their regulators, engaging in a form of regulatory arbitrage that we now know was a race to the bottom. We propose to turn the tables on the banks by allowing regulators, specifically, bank examiners, to choose the banks they regulate. We call this “reverse regulatory arbitrage,” and we think it can help improve regulatory outcomes. Building on our prior work that proposes to pay bank examiners for performance — by giving them financial incentives to avoid bank failures — we argue that bank supervisory assignments should be set through …

Full Disclosure Of Consumer Savings Information , Vance Hartke

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Bank Defenses To Check Forgery And Alteration Claims Under Uniform Commercial Code Articles 3 And 4: Claimant's Negligence And Failure To Give Notice, John W. Hinchey

Pepperdine Law Review

In addressing the dual issues of check forgeries and alteration claims faced by many banks, the Uniform Commercial Code sets forth a system of rights and obligations to remedy these problems. In addition, Articles Three and Four also present an array of bank defenses, the availability of which are largely determined by the bank's position in this system. In this article, the author analyzes the inconsistencies and uncertainties inherent in this framework, and determines that there is much room for creativity on the part of banker's counsel in this area.

Nonbank Banks: A Legitimate Financial Intermediary Emerges From The Bank Holding Company Act Loophole, John Erwin Trytek

Pepperdine Law Review

Nonbank banks represent the financial institutions' recent attempt to avoid the regulations of the Bank Holding Company Act. The evolution of the nonbank bank illustrates the vitality of financial markets and technological change. While banking regulatory statutes have remained static, the dynamics of technology and electronic banking have allowed financial institutions to transcend the state's traditional borders. When static federal regulations began to choke profits, financial institutions sought alternatives to traditional banking. The financial institutions stretched the fabric of banking regulations to their extreme, and the nonbank bank emerged through a loophole in the Bank Holding Company Act. This article …

A Complete View Of The Cathedral: Claims Of Tortious Interference And The Specific Performance Remedy In Mergers And Acquisitions Litigation, Luke Nikas, Paul B. Maslo

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

A bank promises to lend several billion dollars to fund a buyer’s purchase of a target company. The buyer enters into a merger agreement with the target. Thereafter, the economy plummets, and the bank decides that breaching its contract with the buyer will cost less than performing. The buyer seeks specific performance. The target also sues the bank, alleging tortious interference with the merger agreement. Billions of dollars are on the line. This is the reality lived by many investment banks that committed to fund leveraged buyouts during the recent economic downturn. Most of these matters were resolved in private …

The Basel Iii Liquidity Coverage Ratio And Financial Stability, Andrew W. Hartlage

Michigan Law Review

Banks and other financial institutions may increase the amount of credit available in the financial system by borrowing for short terms and lending for long terms. Though this "maturity transformation" is a useful and productive function of banks, it gives rise to the possibility that even prudently managed banks could fail due to a lack of liquid assets. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 revealed the extent to which the U.S. financial system is exposed to the risk of a system-wide failure from insufficient liquidity. Financial regulators from economies around the world have responded to the crisis by proposing new, internationally …

The Volcker Rule's Hedging Exemption, Spencer A. Winters

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The comment period for the proposed regulations to be promulgated under the Volcker Rule expired on February 13, 2012. The rulemakers received over 16,000 comments during that period, in what one commentator described as a "fecal storm." Though that description is hopefully an exaggeration, it is safe to say that the Rule's implementation has been contentious. The Volcker Rule, named for former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, is a component of the Dodd-Frank Act, which Congress passed in response to the recent financial crisis. The Rule's statutory provision charges the nation's financial regulators with issuing a body of …

The Federal Reserve As Last Resort, Colleen Baker

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, is one of the most important and powerful institutions in the world. Surprisingly, legal scholarship hardly pays any attention to the Federal Reserve or to the law structuring and governing its legal authority. This is especially curious given the amount of legal scholarship focused on administrative agencies that do not have anywhere near as critical a domestic and international role as that of the Federal Reserve. At the core of what the Federal Reserve does and should do is to conduct monetary policy so as to safeguard pricing, including that …

Making Banks Transparent, Robert P. Bartlett, Iii

Vanderbilt Law Review

It was March 2007, and in the Mediterranean resort of Monte Carlo, Matt King was making dire predictions about a collapse of the U.S. subprime housing market-a subject that must have seemed as inconsequential as it was foreign to most of this casino town's well- heeled visitors. But for Mr. King, head of quantitative credit strategy for Citigroup, the ramifications of rising subprime foreclosure rates were anything but inconsequential. Speaking at Citigroup's annual credit conference, King emphasized how subprime credit had been repackaged into securities such as collateralized debt obligations ("CDOs"), which now sat in large quantities on banks' balance …

Tax Competition And The Case Of Bank Secrecy Rules: New Trends In International Tax Law, Linneu De Albuquerque Mello

SJD Dissertations

The current integration of world markets has led to an increase in the competition for businesses in addition to the competition for passive investments that already existed. In addition, the current financial crisis led countries to search for additional sources of revenue in order to work within their budget constraints. As tax is an area where such competition is more visible, it has also generated an effort – mainly from industrialized countries and international organizations – to curb tax practices deemed harmful to world economy. Bank secrecy rules and lack of transparency are aspects of these "harmful" tax practices. This …

Behaviorally Informed Regulation, Michael S. Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir

Book Chapters

Policy makers typically approach human behavior from the perspective of the rational agent model, which relics on normativc, a priori analyses. The model assumes people make insightful, well-planned, highly controlled, and calculated decisions guided by considerations of personal utility. This perspective is promoted in the social sciences and in professional schools and has come to dominate much of the formulation and conduct of policy. An alternative view, developed mostly through empirical behavioral research, and the one we will articulate here, provides a substantially difierent perspective on individual behavior and its policy and regulatory implications. According to the empirical perspective, behavior …

Too Libor, Too Late: Time To Move To A Market Rate, Michael S. Barr

Articles

Barclays has been fined, the British have issued their report, and now the market is anxious for everything to go on as usual with the London Interbank Offer Rate (“LIBOR”). I think that would be a serious mistake. The U.S. and British investigations into rate-fixing by Barclays revealed a widespread culture of pervasive, deceitful conduct in the setting of the most important private sector benchmark for over $300 trillion in derivative contracts and $10 trillion in adjustable-rate loans. It is highly unlikely that Barclays was the only major bank engaging in this conduct, and public investigations and private lawsuits against …

Bank Ceos, Inside Debt Compensation, And The Global Financial Crisis, Frederick Tung, Xue Wang

Faculty Scholarship

Bank executives’ compensation has been widely identified as a culprit in the Global Financial Crisis, and reform of banker pay is high on the public policy agenda. While Congress targeted its reforms primarily at bankers’ equity-based pay incentives, empirical research fails to show any correlation between bank CEO equity incentives and bank performance in the Financial Crisis. We offer an alternative analysis, hypothesizing that bank CEOs’ inside debt incentives correlate with reduced bank risk taking and improved bank performance in the Crisis. A nascent literature shows that inside debt may dampen CEOs’ risk taking incentives. Unlike the industrial firms that …

Dodd-Frank Sampler: How Congress Codified An Article 1 Financial Takeover, Anthony Hearn

University of Miami Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Shifting Title And Risk: Islamic Project Finance With Western Partners, Alan J. Alexander

Michigan Journal of International Law

Project finance exemplifies modern globalized business transactions in that a single project can bring together numerous participants from across the world, and in that sense it is a truly international undertaking. A general definition of project finance is "the financing of an economic unit in which the lenders look initially to the cash flows from operation of that economic unit for repayment of the project loan and to those cash flows and other assets comprising the economic unit as collateral for the loan." The "economic unit" is often referred to as a Special Project Vehicle (SPV). Project finance is commonly …

Unclaimed Financial Assets And The Promotion Of Microfinance, Andrew W. Hartlage

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

State governments can effectively promote domestic entrepreneurship in low-income communities and simultaneously fulfill their duties as conservator s of unclaimed property, by lending unclai med financial assets-in-trust at preferential interest rates to in-state microfinance providers. This plan presents an alternative to charitable contributions, though it does not resolve the tension between for-profit and not-for-profit microfinance providers. Such a scheme could be a significant funding source for many microfinance operations in the United States today. Even a small portion of the yearly intake of unclaimed assets would be substantial enough to support fully most microfinance loan portfolios. Also, reinvestment of unclaimed …

Living Wills And Pre-Commitment, Adam Feibelman

American University Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …