Banking and Finance Law Commons^™

Enforcing The Community Reinvestment Act, Jeremy C. Kress, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Law & Economics Working Papers

Nearly fifty years after the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) required banks to serve low- and moderate-income (LMI) areas, the systematic exclusion of disadvantaged communities from the mainstream financial system persists. This Article identifies a novel explanation for the CRA's limited impact: its enforcement mechanisms are ineffective.The CRA operates through two enforcement channels. Regulators must (1) consider a bank's CRA record when the bank seeks permission to merge or expand, and (2) publish periodic assessments of each bank's CRA performance. Using twenty years of CRA data, we show that neither enforcement mechanism works as intended. Banks strategically increase CRA …

Crypto Kleptocracy, W. Robert Thomas, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Michigan Law Review Online

Many Americans are worrying about whether they will soon be living in a postdemocracy autocracy. But in the meantime, they may already be living in a crypto-fueled kleptocracy. Less than one year into his second presidential term, Donald Trump has reportedly taken his wealth to new heights by embracing, both as a businessman and a politician, the crypto industry. Trump’s family businesses are involved in minting Trump-themed meme coins, creating America- themed stablecoins, and mining crypto assets—so successfully that most of Trump’s wealth is likely now from crypto, not real estate. All the while, the Trump Administration is rolling back …

Limits Of Contingent Convertible Bonds: Evidence From The Credit Suisse Collapse, Albert H. Choi, Jacob Gerszten, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Law & Economics Working Papers

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, regulators encouraged banks to issue contingent convertible bonds ("CoCos") to improve the issuing bank's stability. Banks around the world have issued more than $1 trillion worth of CoCos to date. Yet it is unclear whether CoCos have achieved their intended goal of improving stability. Leveraging the unexpected banking panic in March 2023, we show that issuing banks fared worse-as measured by abnormal equity returns and probabilities of default. We also examine market dynamics after 2023 and find that the largest banks have continued to issue CoCos with similar contractual terms, though issuer …

The Gamification Of Banking, Colleen Baker, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

Gamification is coming to banking. This phenomenon is already gain-ing ground in advertising, healthcare, manufacturing, and, more recently, with the GameStop and AMC meme stock saga in securities trading. The idea behind gamification is to make transactions seem fun, playful, and even casino-like in order to elicit habit-forming, addictive-like effects with consumers. This Article argues that the rise of financial technology (“fintech”) firms and their ever-growing business relationships with incumbent financial institutions has created the necessary conditions for gamification to take hold in the banking sector. In order to explore this observation, we undertake a study of current examples of …

Too Scared To Use: Living Wills And Orderly Liquidation Of Too-Big-To-Fail Financial Institutions, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Law & Economics Working Papers

The term “too big to fail” became ubiquitous following the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis. Lawmakers, regulators, and scholars wondered if there was a better way forward than issuing an array of ad hoc bailout packages to large financial institutions. Congress, in enacting the Dodd-Frank Act, sought to address the concern by creating a new regulatory framework to resolve large financial institutions in an orderly manner.

First, Congress required too-big-to-fail institutions to file “living wills,” essentially planning documents that describe the institution’s path to a safe failure under the Bankruptcy Code—a failure that would not impact system-wide financial stability. Second, Congress …

Why Financial Crises Recur, Gary B. Gorton, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Law & Economics Working Papers

Financial crises have occurred around the world for over two centuries. These crises have been so costly and frequent that one wonders why governments cannot prevent them from recurring despite repeated, wide-ranging attempts at legislation, regulation, supervision, and enforcement.

In this article, we argue that lawmakers repeatedly act in two ways that may appear to be intuitive but are actually detrimental to system-wide stability. First, lawmakers fail to understand that “banks”—both traditional banks and shadow banks—produce runnable short-term debt, unlike other firms in the economy. To produce short-term debt, banks operate with opacity. Yet a regulatory framework based on secrecy …

Emergency Liquidity Assistance And Monetary Financing In The European Union: A Case Study In Fiscal Cooperation?, Vincient Arnold

Journal of Financial Crises

In the European Union (EU), primary EU treaty law prohibits central banks from engaging in monetary financing, which includes lending to insolvent firms. This legal prohibition exists alongside, and in parallel to, various regulatory provisions of the Eurosystem. As a result, EU Member State central banks face unique legal limitations when acting in their roles as lenders of last resort, providing emergency liquidity assistance (ELA). In practice, European central banks—both members of the Eurosystem and not—lend to firms of questionable solvency with some frequency, often creatively employing fiscal guarantees to limit their balance sheet exposure and shift the lending risk …

The Changing Architecture Of Trust, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

Trust has always been vital to the healthy functioning of financial markets and the stability of the financial institutions. The mix of public and private institutions that undergird this trust, however, can vary. Often these forces are ignored or taken for granted until something goes wrong. With a marked turn toward deregulation taking hold on both sides of the Atlantic, against a backdrop of central banks having played a very active role intervening to allay distress, it is a good time to revisit these fundamentals. This essay examines the importance of trust, how it is created, how it can be …

Regulating Decentralised Finance? A Singapore Perspective, Rachel Phang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The emergent phenomenon of decentralised finance (“DeFi”) can be understood as the performance of financial functions through applications that are built on distributed ledger technology and operate using cryptoassets and smart contracts, without the need for traditional centralised intermediaries. In what ways does DeFi challenge existing financial regulation, and how should regulation develop in light of the DeFi phenomenon? In addressing this question, this article provides an overview of DeFi, surveys the current regulatory landscape in Singapore, considers key regulatory issues and policy considerations associated with DeFi, and discusses some potential directions for the future development of the regulation of …

Shadow Banking And Securities Law, Gabriel V. Rauterberg, Jeffery Yufeng Zhang

Articles

Shadow banking may be the single greatest challenge facing financial regulation. Financial institutions that function like banks, but fall outside the scope of banking regulation—aptly termed “shadow banks”—were at the heart of the Global Financial Crisis and most episodes of serious financial stress since then. Scholars have largely focused on one response to this problem: extending traditional banking regulation to shadow banks. Yet more than fifteen years after the crisis, major regulatory efforts along this route have stalled.

In this Article, we explore the uneasy case for greater regulation of shadow banking through a different route—securities law. Our first contribution …

Shadow Banking And Securities Law, Gabriel Rauterberg, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Shadow banking may be the single greatest challenge facing financial regulation. Financial institutions that function like banks, but fall outside the scope of banking regulation — aptly termed “shadow banks” — were at the heart of the Global Financial Crisis and most episodes of serious financial stress since then. Scholars have largely focused on one response to this problem: extending traditional banking regulation to shadow banks. Yet more than fifteen years after the crisis, major regulatory efforts along this route have stalled.

In this Article, we explore the uneasy case for greater regulation of shadow banking through a different route …

Creditors, Shareholders, And Losers In Between: A Failed Regulatory Experiment, Albert H. Choi, Jeffery Zhang

Articles

In the aftermath of the 2007–08 Global Financial Crisis, regulators encouraged many of the world’s largest banks to hold a new type of regulatory instrument with the goal of improving their safety and soundness. The regulatory instrument was known as a “CoCo,” short for contingent convertible bond. CoCos are neither debt nor equity. They are something in between, designed to give the bank a shot in the arm during times of stress. Many of the largest international banks have issued CoCos worth hundreds of billions of dollars. After more than ten years—a decade that includes the collapse of Credit Suisse …

Shadow Banking And Securities Law, Gabriel Rauterberg, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Law & Economics Working Papers

Shadow banking may be the single greatest challenge facing financial regulation. Financial institutions that function like banks, but outside the scope of banking regulation—aptly termed “shadow banking”—were at the heart of the Global Financial Crisis and most episodes of serious financial stress since then. Scholars have largely focused on one response to this problem—extending traditional banking regulation to shadow banks. Yet more than fifteen years after the crisis, major regulatory efforts along this route have stalled.

In this Article, we explore the uneasy case for greater regulation of shadow banking through securities law. Our first contribution is analytical. We demonstrate …

The Hidden Monetary State, Gabriel Rauterberg, Joshua Younger

Faculty Scholarship

Money is a motley. While the state enjoys a monopoly on issuing new physical currency, a variety of instruments serve money-like roles in the financial system. The commercial banking system significantly augments the money supply through issuing deposits. Alongside it, a shadow banking system has also developed, offering a range of deposit substitutes.

This Article seeks to cast new light on the U.S. financial system by exploring how, over the course of the twentieth century, federal policymakers engaged in a series of distinct and largely uncoordinated monetary experiments. As we show through historical case studies, federal authorities designed, promoted, and …

Financial Regulation Beyond Stability, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

This essay briefly reviews the ways stability has dominated regulatory and academic discourse about financial regulation. It then uses anti-money laundering (AML) and the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHL Banks) — the oldest government foray into housing policy — as case studies to show that banks and the financial system are already deeply engaged in efforts to further other important government policies. These case studies affirm just how hard it can be to promote healthy public-private coordination, while also revealing why such arrangements have become so pervasive. More than anything, the aim here is to force acknowledgment of the myriad …

Generative Ai In Finance: Risks And Potential Solutions, Nydia Remolina Leon

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Generative Artificial Intelligence captured the attention of academics, policymakers, the private sector, and some regulators in 2022 after the launch of ChatGPT and its widespread adoption worldwide. Then, during the World Economic Forum session in 2023, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said that the ‘golden age’ of AI is underway and generative AI is set to play a big role in it. Accordingly, Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI, the company behind the launch of ChatGPT. Additionally, Google and Meta have also created their own generative AI models. Given the multiplicity of potential use cases …

The Administrative State, Financial Regulation, And The Case For Commissions, Kathryn Judge, Dan Awrey

Faculty Scholarship

Administrative law is under attack, with the Supreme Court reviving, expanding, and creating doctrines that limit the authority and autonomy wielded by regulatory agencies. This anti-administrative turn is particularly alarming for financial regulation, which already faces enormous challenges stemming from the dynamism of modern finance, its growing complexity, and fundamental contestability. Yet that does not mean that defending the current regime is the optimal response. The complexity and dynamism of modern finance also undercut the efficacy of established administrative procedures. And the panoply of financial regulators with unclear and overlapping jurisdictional bounds only adds to the challenge. Both these procedural …

Regulating Crypto Intermediaries, Eric D. Chason

Marquette Law Review

Early 2024 produced a dramatic rebound in cryptocurrency markets as Bitcoin hit an all-time high price in March 2024. This surge was fueled in large part by judicial and regulatory action. After years of denials and a high-profile defeat in court, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finally approved the first exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for Bitcoin in January 2024. Many believe that these approvals will lead to a greater shift of investment funds into crypto. Crypto regulation is not, however, ready for this shift. While ETFs have clear treatment under current law, other institutions lack the same clarity or …

Protecting The Sovereign's Money Monopoly, Gary B. Gorton, Jeffery Zhang

Articles

Sovereign states have held a monopoly over the production of circulating money for well over a century. Governments, not private entities, issue circulating money. The advent of stablecoins—privately issued digital money that can circulate—raises the question of the sovereign’s money monopoly from the grave. Should private money circulate alongside sovereign money in the twenty-first century? We argue against coexistence to preserve financial stability and monetary sovereignty.

Through the lens of economic theory, we explore the coexistence question by revisiting the original debates that led to the sovereign’s money monopoly in England, the United States, Canada, and Sweden. In each case, …

The Macroprudential Myth, Jeremy C. Kress, Jeffery Yufeng Zhang

Articles

According to conventional wisdom, the 2008 fnancial crisis fundamen- tally changed how policymakers approach fnancial regulation. Before the crisis, regulators sought to prevent individual fnancial institutions from collapsing, but this “microprudential” strategy proved inadequate to stop the market-wide meltdown. In response, policymakers purportedly turned to a new “macroprudential” approach that prioritizes the stability of the fnancial system as a whole instead of individual institutions in isolation. Regulators in the United States and abroad enthusiastically embraced macroprudential policy, implementing stress tests, capital buffers, liquidity requirements, and other supposed macroprudential tools. As the United States’ top bank regulator declared in 2015, “[W]e …

Law’S Detrimental Reliance On Intermediaries, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Emerging technology is law’s magic mirror. Even as law seeks to cabin the effects of emerging technology in society, when we hold emerging technology up to law, emerging technology often reflects flaws or gaps in legal constructs. Of course, rather than recognizing those flaws or gaps, law retorts back “mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?,” demanding that all other disciplines and constructs bow before law’s mighty, near-perfect reach. Often, no matter how strongly emerging technology demands that law bend, legal evolution only occurs after regulatory failures harm individuals on a massive scale. One emerging …

Regulating Cryptocurrency Derivatives: A Comparative Analysis Of Approaches In The Uk, The Eu And Singapore, Rachel Phang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Cryptocurrency derivatives have been attracting growing retail and institutional interest, raising the increasingly pertinent question of how such products should be regulated. This paper assesses different regulatory approaches in the United Kingdom, the European Union and Singapore, and considers what insights these might provide for the regulation of cryptocurrency derivatives generally.

Capital Regulation As Climate Policy, Joel Michaels

Center for Law and the Economy

Federal banking regulators are grappling with how to confront the threats posed by climate change. There are increasingly loud calls for regulators to adjust the “risk-weights” used to calculate banks’ minimum capital requirements based on how exposed their counterparties are to climate-related risks. This action could reduce risks to the financial system, and potentially make it less desirable for banks to lend to carbon- intensive activities. But other scholars have challenged the legality and administrability of this proposal. They argue that it is difficult to gather reliable empirical data about climate-related risks, and that any risk- weights that are not …

The Failure Of Market Efficiency, William Magnuson

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have witnessed the near total triumph of market efficiency as a regulatory goal. Policymakers regularly proclaim their devotion to ensuring efficient capital markets. Courts use market efficiency as a guiding light for crafting legal doctrine. And scholars have explored in great depth the mechanisms of market efficiency and the role of law in promoting it. There is strong evidence that, at least on some metrics, our capital markets are indeed more efficient than they have ever been. But the pursuit of efficiency has come at a cost. By focusing our attention narrowly on economic efficiency concerns—such as competition, …

Shining A Light On Shadow Banks, Patrick M. Corrigan

Journal Articles

From the Article

The Article first shows that the innovative design of securitization vehicles is to give banking entities exposure to residual and subordinated parts of these vehicle’s capital stacks without triggering a legal conclusion that the vehicles are bank “affiliates” or “investment companies,” thus avoiding regulation under the banking laws and investment company laws. The Article then applies this transactional-based analytical framework to the 2007-09 financial crisis. It presents data showing how the traditional banking sector owned, controlled, and backstopped many of the securitization vehicles at the heart of the crisis.

The Article argues for updating the boundary lines …

Fenceposts Without A Fence, Katherine E. Dr Lucido, Nicholas K. Tabor, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Articles

Banking organizations in the United States have long been subject to two broad categories of regulatory requirements. The first is permissive: a “positive” grant of rights and privileges, typically via a charter for a corporate entity, to engage in the business of banking. The second is restrictive: a “negative” set of conditions on those rights and privileges, limiting conduct and imposing a program of oversight and enforcement, by which the holder of that charter must abide. Together, these requirements form a legal cordon, or “regulatory perimeter,” around the U.S. banking sector.

Exploring The Assetisation And Financialisation Of Non-Fungible Tokens: Opportunities And Regulatory Implications, Iris H. Y. Chiu, J.G. Allen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article explores the emerging phenomenon of use cases for Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) in novel forms of crypto-finance, a stage we call “NFT financialisation”, that can be developed from stages of consumption and commoditisation of NFTs, which are increasingly observed. Despite the emerging contests regarding property rights conferred by NFTs, the needs for commoditisation and financialisation in NFT markets would likely shape the delineation and framing of such rights in order for users to exploit the asset potential of NFTs. We argue that an institutional response is timely and beneficial for NFT financialisation. Financial regulatory governance can provide the institutions …

Decentralized Finance: Implications Of The So-Called Disintermediation Of Financial Services, Nydia Remolina Leon

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Decentralized Finance, known as DeFi, refers to the use of blockchain and digital assets or crypto-assets for the provision of financial services. Under this concept, services such as loans, insurance, crypto-asset exchanges, among others, are offered, are structured based on crypto-assets and through technologically decentralized applications. This chapter discusses the concept of DeFi and how it challenges the traditional market infrastructures of the financial sector, demystifying the idea of absolute decentralization, generally mentioned in the crypto-asset arena, from the perspective of decision-makers and governors of these decentralized applications. Subsequently, the chapter analyses the opportunities and challenges of DeFi for consumers, …

Money Finds A Way: Increasing Aml Regulation Garners Diminishing Returns And Increases Demand For Dark Financing, Jacquelyn B. Lewis

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The cost of anti-money laundering regulations has grown to many billions of dollars, and countries worldwide are increasingly complying with international standards for financial regulation. Yet, the interception rate for criminal proceeds remains under 1 percent. Banks in the United States, United Kingdom, and France continue to engage in unsafe practices, undeterred by legal penalties. Recent US legislation will narrow, but not eliminate, regulatory gaps. The cost of regulation has become so great that banks accept litigation as a cost of doing business or reduce legal exposure by ending relationships in areas of perceived high risk for money laundering; this …

What Is The Law's Role In A Recession?, Gabriel Rauterberg, Joshua Younger

Faculty Scholarship

In March 2020, the world faced not only a public health emergency but also one of the most profound shocks to the global economy in the modern era — a shock deeper and broader than any other in eighty years. Never before had virtually all of the world’s economies suffered a contraction at the same time (Tooze, p. 5). Global output decreased by nearly 3.4% in 2020, the largest contraction since the Second World War. The United States saw the largest recorded demand shock in its history (-32.9%), and the unemployment rate peaked around 15% during 2020, higher than at …