Sky Blog
The year 2015 marked the fifth anniversary of passage of the Dodd-Frank Act and, for many private fund managers, the third anniversary of SEC registration under the Investment Advisers Act. The past year also saw a number of notable SEC …
In September 2007, Northern Rock, a British bank, sought and received liquidity support from the Bank of England because of financial difficulties resulting from the global financial crisis. As a result of mounting political pressure that Northern Rock was exploiting …
On January 21, 2016, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the latest annual revision to the size thresholds governing premerger notification requirements under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended, Section 7A of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. …
Once again, NML v. Argentina is in the spotlight. Sovereign debt’s “trial of the century”[1] has been the focal point of intense academic and policy debates, prompted a Supreme Court decision, and even triggered a contested default by Argentina …
In a recent decision relating to the sale of a portfolio company by one private equity firm to another—Prairie Capital v. Double E (Nov. 24, 2015)—the court provided important guidance with respect to a buyer’s ability to make post-closing …
Intermediation is a fundamental fact of finance. Investment banks underwrite stock offerings for companies. Commercial banks safeguard the savings of workers. Fund managers invest the pensions of retirees. Exchanges match orders of buyers and sellers. Brokers facilitate trades of investors. …
Merger agreements and other complex contracts often contain “anti-reliance” provisions reciting that the representations in the agreement are the sole representations on which the parties relied in entering into the contract. The law regarding the interpretation and enforceability of such …
The message of the Dow/DuPont merger and split up is simple: No firm is today “too big to target.” Activists can see the transaction as evidence that, even in the rare case where they lose a proxy fight (as they …
On November 18, 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) proposed amendments (the “Proposal”) to Regulation ATS and related rules under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the “Exchange Act”) to impose extensive new …
Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX 404 hereafter) and the associated implementation guidance require firms’ management and independent financial statement auditor to formally document, test, and report publicly in the annual Form 10-K on the effectiveness of …
Large and small technology-creating businesses rely on trade secret law to protect strategic information. Lawyers recommend a variety of legal tools to protect trade secrets, including tools that allow firms to share secrets as safely as possible. One of those …
There are few types of debt as internationally issued and traded as the debt securities issued in securitisation (in the United States, spelled securitization) transactions. European investors commonly invest in securities issued in U.S. securitisation transactions, and vice versa.
It …
Corporate taxpayers have clear incentives to legally minimize their tax liabilities to the extent that doing so maximizes after-tax returns. Conversely, tax authorities have a clear mandate to ensure that taxpayers meet their tax obligations and enforce tax rules in …
Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) recently issued, in the form of Frequently Asked Questions, a further update to its 2016 proxy voting guidelines to outline the types of management-sponsored proxy access provisions that ISS will deem responsive to shareholder-supported …
Because of the separation of ownership and control of public companies, the quarterly earnings that firms report are immensely important to outside investors. They are the most relevant barometer of not only a company’s recent past performance, but also of …
After more than four years of congressional consideration of cyber issues, legislation to authorize companies to share cyber threat information has finally been enacted. On December 18, 2015, President Obama signed into law the omnibus federal government spending and tax …
Since 2000, the financial world and global economy have been shaken by two catastrophic and entirely avoidable waves of financial scandals. At the turn of the millennium, accounting fraud at Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and several other large enterprises rocked financial …
My recent paper explains why, from a bank supervisory perspective, the Federal Reserve’s Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) program is arguably the single most significant and innovative post-crisis regulatory reform. Established in 2011, the CCAR is an annual Federal …