Sky Blog
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 …
The quasi collapse of the global financial system during the crisis of 2007-2009 has triggered an extensive debate about the role of large complex banks. On the one hand, banks are seen as “too complex to fail”, and researchers and …
On December 18, 2015, President Obama signed into law the Cybersecurity Act of 2015. The Act, arguably the most significant piece of federal cyber-related legislation enacted to date, establishes a mechanism for cybersecurity information sharing among private‑sector and federal government …
On November 3rd, high-frequency trader Michael Coscia was found guilty in Chicago in one of the most-watched financial trials in recent years.[1] His conviction under Dodd-Frank’s new anti-spoofing provision is important on a number of levels: what it means …
The limited liability company (LLC) is not only a widespread business form for non-listed firms but also is used by listed companies. There were twenty publicly traded US LLCs in September 2013—all formed in Delaware. Two more Delaware LLCs have …
Corporate governance mitigates agency costs by protecting outside investors from exploitation from insiders, as well as aligning the financial and other incentives of insiders with those of the principal. The literature remains underdeveloped, however, on those tasked with shaping and …
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) on December 10th issued the second iteration of its proposed revisions to the standardized approach (SA) for credit risk measurement. Following up on last year’s initial issuance, the proposed revisions are intended …
Debt has undergone a remarkable resurrection in relation to banks’ capital structures. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis it was uncertain whether debt would survive at all in the Basel Committee’s minimum capital requirements for internationally active banks. Today, …
Ethan Allen and its management prevailed a few weeks ago against an intense hedge fund activist campaign to remove its entire board of directors.
An analyst of one of our larger shareholders, the Gabelli funds, observed “I’ve never seen a …
In two previous posts,[1] I described the financial industry’s “single point of entry” (SPOE) strategy for resolving failed megabanks. The SPOE approach – which has been endorsed by the Federal Reserve Board (Fed) and other regulators – could be …
High frequency trading is all of a go,
With joy to the traders and profits that grow,
It brings to investors an unhappy blow.
Investors and traders in capital markets have always sought to be better informed and to trade …
The conventional story around the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is that it was the final blow in bringing down the Glass-Steagall Act wall that separated commercial and investment banking in 1999, increasing risky business activities by commercial banks and inadvertently precipitating the …
Headlines about unicorns—private companies with valuations of a billion dollars or more—have dominated newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the like. It has become part of the fabric of the venture capital …
As political spending surges toward record levels in 2016, post-Citizens United changes in the funding of American political campaigns will require directors to oversee a dramatically deregulated political environment. Corporate money will play a large role in the election, heightening …
On December 1, 2015, the New York Department of Financial Services (the DFS) released a proposed rule that would require certain New York-regulated financial institutions (Regulated Institutions) to comply with enhanced anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements and subject chief …