Sky Blog
Columbia Law Professor John C. Coffee, Jr.’s Corporate Crime and Punishment delivers a hard-hitting and provocative analysis of the securities law enforcement landscape and the choices that lie ahead. With SEC senior staff changes probable in any new administration, Coffee’s …
The 2008 financial crisis triggered a surge of interest in regulating consumer financial markets. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to safeguard consumer interests. Since 2011, the CFPB …
Even in the best of times, corporate leaders gripe about the cost of government regulations. An average hedge fund spends more than 7 percent of its total operating costs on various forms of compliance.[1] For the banking industry, compliance …
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (the “CARES Act”), which was signed into law on March 27, 2020, provides $2 trillion in emergency relief to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, and financial institutions. This includes up to $349 …
Exchange traded funds (ETFs) sit at the center of the COVID-19 crisis selloff.[1] This isn’t surprising, since ETFs are a low-cost highly liquid vehicle for trading entire sectors, asset classes, and even global economies. Yet the use of ETFs …
Past financial crises have been characterized by panics, runs, and restrictions on the availability of credit, and our crisis prevention measures (including capital regulation, deposit insurance, and the lender of last resort) have been adopted in light of this historical …
Few things are more predictable than loud demands for regulatory interventions to stop speculation when stock market prices plunge: In these days, as in any recent stock market crash, we hear politicians and commentators inviting regulators to enact interventions spanning
The greatest single-day decline in the stock market this century, widespread fear and uncertainty, shuttered schools, an end to large gatherings everywhere from NBA games to the South by Southwest festival – these are just a few of the signs …
Modern finance is fast moving, extremely complex, and contributes to pervasive unknowns. Yet the processes governing how finance is regulated are typically slow, highly deliberative, and often reflect deeply ingrained and incredibly optimistic assumptions about our ability to understand the …
On September 26, 2019, the SEC released the much-anticipated new rule and form amendments designed to modernize the regulation of Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs).[1] Rule 6c-11 under the Investment Company Act permits ETFs that satisfy certain conditions to operate without …
The problems in global financial markets are often similar, even though the capital market structure across jurisdictions differs significantly. The beginning of the 21st century was marked by a spate of international corporate scandals, and the 2007-2009 global financial …
If there was one thing most people could agree on after the 2008 financial crisis, it was that “too-big-to-fail” banks were to blame for the market crash. This shared understanding was accompanied by a corollary: Small banks were not the …
One of the repercussions of the housing market collapse in the U.S. in 2007 was global anxiety about excess leverage, debt repayment, and overall credit conditions. Risk-pricing levels increased abruptly for highly indebted countries, making new borrowing to refinance debt …
Accounting fraud imposes severe costs on firms and their stakeholders. Firms at which fraud occurs often have inefficient resource allocation and face higher cost of capital and regulatory penalties. While shareholders suffer the brunt of these damages, frauds can also …
Bank behavior and how it relates to bank fragility and systemic risk have been in the spotlight since the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Regulators claim that bankers’ compensation structures played a role in encouraging behavior which contributed to the financial crisis. …
Shocks to only part of the financial system, such as the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in 2007, can spread and intensify through the complex interconnections among financial and non-financial institutions to become systemic threats. The consequences can be …
One of the principal lessons learned from the 2007-2009 financial crisis was the need for new legal regimes to facilitate the rapid and orderly resolution of systemically important financial institutions without a government bailout. In the final part of a …
More than a decade has passed since the worst of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. In that time, we have learned that some of the gravest consequences of the crisis were not the economic fallout, but the political backlash it triggered. …
Larry Summers, who was one of President Obama’s key economic advisors when the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was enacted, recently decried what he called “excessive populism” in portions of that legislation. This might seem surprising; Dodd-Frank’s technocracy-on-steroids approach (848 pages! …
Calming the panic in short-term funding markets was a significant part of the response to the 2008 financial crisis. While the TARP bailout programs received the most attention during the crisis, TARP never exceeded one-fifth of the government’s overall financial …