Archive for the ‘Bankruptcy’ Category

The New York Fed and the Rule of Law

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

In Sunday’s New York Times, business columnist Gretchen Morgenson reported a piece of investigative journalism that is transcendently important, but whose complexity may have obscured that. It concerns secret dealings of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Morgenson explains the importance of her topic in terms of the threatened erosion of social trust that can occur when central banking officials engage in dubious behavior.

I would add that her topic, dubious dealings of central bankers, is of vital importance because those who run the FRBNY have enormous power in the field of banking regulation. They oversee the largest banks and provide direct input into the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the interagency government organization created by the Dodd Frank Act to oversee the financial system. It is empowered to intervene when the next financial crisis occurs, which could be later this year or five years or ten or what have you.

As with the financial crisis of 2008, these government actors, dominated by the FRBNY, will call all the shots about which institutions to save, sell or seize, on the one hand, and which creditors and shareholders to pay, wipe out or shortchange, on the other. How they exercise these powers is thus a matter of the utmost national interest. How they exercised them in the 2008 crisis remains both obscure and questionable. Read the rest of this post »

  March 5, 2013 at 10:52 am   Posted in: Administrative Law, Bankruptcy, Corporate Finance, Current Events, Financial Institutions   Print This Post   No Comments

Volume 60, Issue 2 (December 2012)

posted by UCLA Law Review

Volume 60, Issue 2 (December 2012)

Articles

The Battle Over Taxing Offshore Accounts	Itai Grinberg	304
The Structural Exceptionalism of Bankruptcy Administration	Rafael I. Pardo & Kathryn A. Watts	384
Patients’ Racial Preferences and the Medical Culture of Accommodation	Kimani Paul-Emile	462

Comments

“Not Susceptible to the Logic of Turner”: Johnson v. California and the Future of Gender Equal Protection Claims From Prisons

Grace DiLaura

506

  December 28, 2012 at 11:54 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Constitutional Law, Feminism and Gender, Health Law, International & Comparative Law, Law Rev (UCLA), Tax   Print This Post   No Comments

The Penn State Disaster Pool

posted by Dave Hoffman

So this is interesting:

“The mediator who managed the Sept. 11 victims-compensation fund and settlements with those affected by the 2010 BP Gulf oil spill has been hired by Pennsylvania State University in the hope of settling the civil claims of Jerry Sandusky’s victims.

The university announced Thursday that it had hired Kenneth R. Feinberg to facilitate negotiations for the four current lawsuits and more expected to be filed by those sexually abused by the former assistant football coach.”

One way to read this is that PSU is going to make available a large pool of money to a diverse victim class, and has hired Feinberg for his expertise dividing complex pies in ways that leave most folks relatively satisfied.  But there’s another reading that seems at least plausible.  Associating with Feinberg transmutes the human errors which enabled Sandusky’s crimes into a “disaster”, implying less particularized responsibility.  Plaintiffs refusing to partake in the common pool can potentially be framed as selfish, grasping, etc.  That so even though almost by definition, these disaster pools allocate less money to every plaintiff than their individual claims are “worth”.

  September 20, 2012 at 10:57 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Economic Analysis of Law   Print This Post   5 Comments

Student Debt Discharge in Bankruptcy

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I have a question for all of you bankruptcy lawyers who read CoOp.  Is there a principled reason for the rule that student debt is generally not dischargeable in personal bankruptcy?  Or is the only real defense of this rule that “lenders lobbied Congress successfully on this one?”

  May 29, 2012 at 6:06 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy   Print This Post   11 Comments

Does the Secured Transactions Course Make Sense?

posted by Dave Hoffman

I’ve never taught Secured Transactions, so I’ll start by saying that the following is purely speculative and subject to correction.

We had a job candidate come through at some point this Fall who generally is interested in the field of commercial law.  That person mentioned in passing that although they were more than willing to teach the traditional secured transactions course, in their opinion it wasn’t well structured.  Why? Not, as the navel-gazer might imagine, because the field of commercial law is supposedly intellectually dead.  Rather because the traditional secured transaction course is too narrowly conceived — it usually is limited in coverage to personal property security interests under Article 9.  But many security interests that matter to lawyers aren’t held on movable property.  Since secured is ordinarily the foundational course for the commercial curriculum, students are left starting on too narrow a footing in understanding bankruptcy and bank regulation.  It’s even worse than having a corporations course that excludes LLCs.  Because of its technicality, ST is traditionally so difficult to teach that many students are turned off to the idea of commercial law practice at all.

Again, I don’t know much about this area of law.  I never took ST in law school, I haven’t taught it, and (worse) I haven’t even read a ST syllabus at my current institution.  But it struck me as an interesting thought, at least worth airing.  It’s related to concerns I have about the general corporate curriculum — is “corporations” really a subject that ought to be taught in a single course, or is it really a merger of too many (or too few) legal principles that have glommed together over time.  It’s also related to concerns that one might have about continuing to use the increasingly outdated, purportedly uniform, UCC to teach when States’ adopted versions are moving ever-further-away from that ideal.

  December 2, 2011 at 11:54 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Contract Law & Beyond, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   15 Comments

Audit Trails: The Corporate Surveillance We Need

posted by Frank Pasquale

What do the following problems have in common?

1) food poisoning
2) systemic risk in the financial system
3) data breaches
4) violations of civil liberties
5) tax evasion
6) insider trading

In each case, we could do a lot more to stop the problem if we better tracked the actions that lead to it. An “audit trail” can enable that tracking. Decades ago, such tracking would be inordinately costly. Nowadays, it is increasingly embedded into any quality logistical system. The technologies of RFID chips, cheap imaging and data storage, and rapid search are ubiquitous. Corporations use them to track customers and products. Now public authorities need to use them to track corporations.

Consider, for instance, this recent story on food safety:
Read the rest of this post »

  August 28, 2011 at 5:42 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Financial Institutions, Government Secrecy, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Medical)   Print This Post   One Comment

Will in Insolvency

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

In this week’s New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten, in the Talk of the Town, kindly draws on my work  about the cultural contingency of financial reporting; he quotes me on the need to update the idea of insolvency.  Usually defined as the ability to pay debts as they come due, or assets exceeding liabilities, there has always been a strong objective thrust to the notion.  The emphasis is on measured financial activity reduced to a verifiable expression of ability. 

But as Nick notes, equally important is a debtor’s will to pay.  The differences appear in the contrast between the United States and Greece.When  Standard & Poor’s recently lowered its credit rating of the U.S. Treasury by one notch, it registered doubt not so much about the country’s ability to pay its debt, but the will of its incumbant political class to do so. In contrast, Greece’s political elite seem committed to finding ways to meet that country’s debts; alas, its resources compared to its obligations raise real doubt about their ability to do so. 

Another example of the difference between the ability and the will to pay debts arose in the September 2008 tussle over what to do about American International Group. It was then the world’s largest insurance company and shortly before the crisis  boasted a market capitalization of $180 billion. Much of its trillion-dollar balance sheet was securely housed in walled-off insurance subsidiaries.  Read the rest of this post »

  August 22, 2011 at 10:30 am   Posted in: Accounting, Bankruptcy, Culture, Current Events   Print This Post   7 Comments

Deceptive by Design: Derivatives as Secret Liens

posted by Frank Pasquale

Secretive practices and institutions are common in contemporary finance. For those who’ve ceased the search for long-term value creation, temporary information advantage is key. Even commonplace practices can be reinterpreted as havens of hiddenness. My colleague Michael Simkovic’s article “Secret Liens and the Financial Crisis of 2008” exposes the role of derivatives and securitization as secretive borrowing strategies, designed to keep the naive or trusting from discovering the fragility of the institutions they loan funds to. His work has been presented to the World Bank Task Force on the Bankruptcy Treatment of Financial Contracts, and is relevant to both private and sovereign debt risks.

Simkovic argues that 80 years of erosion of classic commercial law doctrine ensured that “complex and opaque financial products received the highest priority in bankruptcy.” Products like swaps and over-the-counter derivatives were not adequately disclosed (either by banks in their consolidated financial statements or by their counterparties in publicly accessible transaction registries). By concealing those debts, these already overleveraged financial institutions were able to attract ever more credit and investment, at better rates than those who reported their overall financial health more accurately. (All other things being equal, it’s safer to lend to an entity that owes 10 billion rather than 100 billion dollars.) The genius of Simkovic’s article is to show how “fundamental causes of the financial crisis are relatively old and simple,” even as an alphabet soup of instrument acronyms (CDO, CDS, MBS, ad nauseam) and government programs (TARP, TALF, PPIP, et al.) makes our time seem unique.
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  June 8, 2011 at 8:54 am   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Corruption, Financial Institutions   Print This Post   4 Comments

Sidebar Publishes Essay on Rubin v. Eurofinance

posted by Columbia Law Review

Columbia Law Review’s Sidebar is pleased to announce the publication of Rubin v. Eurofinance:  Universal Bankruptcy Jurisdiction or a Comity of Errors? by Rebecca R. Zubaty of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.

In her essay, Zubaty argues that the English appeals court in Rubin v. Eurofinance missed an opportunity to modernize English rules on the recognition of foreign bankruptcy judgments.  Instead, the essay describes how the court seized on the special bankruptcy circumstances of the case to overcome traditional barriers to recognition of the original foreign judgment by a U.S. bankruptcy court.  Zubaty argues that the court’s decision will have “the immediate practical effect of subjecting any person who may have any property or interest worth attaching in the U.K. to the jurisdiction of all bankruptcy courts worldwide.”  The decision may even have broader ramifications, such as “empower[ing] courts faced with novel conflicts questions to dispense with all conventions, foreign and domestic, to achieve what they deem to be the right outcome.”

  June 5, 2011 at 6:44 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Law Rev (Columbia)   Print This Post   One Comment

Invisible Hand or Hidden Fist?

posted by Frank Pasquale

In his press conference last week, Ben Bernanke concluded on an upbeat note. He had high hopes for a US recovery, since he believed that the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 hadn’t taken from the US any of its basic productive capacity.

Whatever the merits of that view, the GFC did highlight debilitating trends in US finance infrastructure that have been intensifying for years. In this week’s Businessweek, Hernando de Soto (with Karen Weise) highlights one of the most important: the opacity of key markets and relationships. With scant exaggeration, de Soto warns that the US is on its way to levels of uncertainty more common in developing and communist countries:

During the second half of the 19th century, the world’s biggest economies endured a series of brutal recessions. At the time, most forms of reliable economic knowledge were organized within feudal, patrimonial, and tribal relationships. . . . The result was a huge rift between the old, fragmented social order and the needs of a rising, globalizing market economy.

To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. . . . The result was the invention of the first massive “public memory systems” to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account—all the relevant knowledge available, whether intangible (stocks, commercial paper, [etc]), or tangible (land, buildings, boats, machines, etc.). Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: “economic facts.”

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  April 30, 2011 at 4:49 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law, Financial Institutions, Insurance Law, Property Law   Print This Post   3 Comments

UCLA Law Review Vol. 58, Issue 3 (February 2011)

posted by UCLA Law Review

Volume 58, Issue 3 (February 2011)

Articles

Good Faith and Law Evasion	Samuel W. Buell	611
Making Sovereigns Indispensable: Pimentel and the Evolution of Rule 19	Katherine Florey	667
The Need for a Research Culture in the Forensic Sciences	Jennifer L. Mnookin et al.	725
Commentary on The Need for a Research Culture in the Forensic Sciences	Joseph P. Bono	781
Commentary on The Need for a Research Culture in the Forensic Sciences	Judge Nancy Gertner	789
Commentary on The Need for a Research Culture in the Forensic Sciences	Pierre Margot	795

Comments

What’s Your Position? Amending the Bankruptcy Disclosure Rules to Keep Pace With Financial Innovation	Samuel M. Kidder	803
Defendant Class Actions and Patent Infringement Litigation	Matthew K. K. Sumida	843

  February 25, 2011 at 1:19 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Courts, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, Evidence Law, History of Law, Indian Law, Intellectual Property, International & Comparative Law, Jurisprudence, Law and Humanities, Law and Inequality, Law and Psychology, Law Practice, Law Rev (UCLA), Psychology and Behavior, Race, Sociology of Law, Supreme Court   Print This Post   No Comments

Let the Good Times Roll

posted by Michelle Harner

The PR departments of the Big 3 automakers are working overtime. With the public opening of the North American International Auto Show just days away, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler released financial results showing a significant increase in sales in 2010 and promising outlooks for 2011. And the flurry of news coverage certainly has a different feel than the doom and gloom of the coverage just two years ago (see, e.g., here).

Why the difference? Is the economic recovery helping the Big 3? Is chapter 11 bankruptcy the reason for the apparent rebirth of General Motors and Chrysler? If so, what explains Ford’s current success (for some interesting perspectives on this, see here and here)?

Many commentators have analyzed the General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcy cases, and they thoughtfully dissect what was novel, not so novel and somewhat troubling about those cases (see, e.g., here, here and here). It is difficult to assess exactly what role chapter 11 played in General Motors’ and Chrysler’s recoveries, other than to state the obvious that both companies used the process to reduce overhead and balance sheet liabilities significantly. That certainly can provide new life to a company; the question then becomes what the company does with the opportunity.

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  January 12, 2011 at 9:16 am  Tags: Bankruptcy, Corporate Law, Current Events  Posted in: Bankruptcy   Print This Post   2 Comments

The Rule of Flaw: Ibanez and the Too-Big-to-Succeed Problem

posted by Jonathan Lipson

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s recent ruling in U.S. Bank v. Ibanez  is the latest and loudest salvo in what may be the most engaging and gruesome legal aspect of the credit crisis yet:  The day of reckoning for the staggering sloppiness that infected virtually every step of the mortgage-securitization process.

Ibanez held that, according to well-established Massachusetts precedent, a mortgagee cannot foreclose unless — surprise, surprise — it actually isthe mortgagee, or a legitimate assignee thereof.  In Ibanez,  lenders or servicers had foreclosed mortgages prior to completing (or commencing) the process of taking assignment of the note and  mortgage  on which they foreclosed.  When they later sought to clear title, Massachusetts courts balked.   “Utter carelessness,” Justice Cordy scolded the plaintiffs.

This is potentially a huge problem for mortgage servicers (among others), given the long and convoluted chains of title through which mortgages may have passed in order to create mortgage-backed securities (MBS).   Not surprisingly, many observers are apoplectic, warning that this will lead to the end of the financial markets as we know them. 

How did this happen? 

There are probably several answers, but I think one is that the elite financial services sector (EFSS) that created the MBS is (or believes itself to be) a unique institutional force, unchallengeable by the ordinary legal or political mechanisms that keep institutions in check.  It is immune from the rules and norms  that apply to the rest of us.  But we know that spoilt children often lack discipline, so persistent failures of scrutiny have led inevitably to failures of competence. The drip, drip, drip of deregulation left us with firms that are not only too big to fail: they’re also too big to succeed. 

What will happen next? 

Read the rest of this post »

  January 10, 2011 at 5:40 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Corporate Finance   Print This Post   One Comment

Are You a Winner?

posted by Michelle Harner

Two lucky people woke up this morning mega millionaires. After yesterday’s lottery ticket buying frenzy, one winning ticket was sold in Idaho and the other in Washington (see here). The winners will share equally the $355 million jackpot.

Sounds like a dream coming true, right? Unfortunately, for many lottery winners, winning the lottery eventually leads to bankruptcy (see here, here and here). Statistics tend to show that a good portion of lottery winners file chapter 7 or chapter 13 personal bankruptcy cases within five years of receiving their jackpots (see here and here). In one sense, the tale of doom attached to big lottery winnings seems similar to the ploy of telling a bride that rain on her wedding day signals good luck—it makes those of us who didn’t win feel a little better. In another sense, however, it highlights a real problem in our approach to financial education.

Yesterday, the American Bankruptcy Institute reported a significant increase in overall personal bankruptcy filings. Undoubtedly, some of those filings are the direct result of the recession, and some filings stem from similar unforeseen changes in circumstances, such as divorce and serious health problems. But many personal bankruptcies involve honest, unsophisticated individuals who simply do not understand or have the skill set to manage their personal finances. Yes, these individuals should take responsibility for their finances, but they also need training and resources to be successful in that endeavor. Studies suggest that many high school graduates do not understand how credit cards and other basic financial instruments work (see here, here and here), yet most carry credit and debit cards in their wallets.

I appreciate the enormous challenges facing the U.S. education system. As we evaluate these challenges, however, we need to consider financial education as part of the core curriculum. We also need to continue working to provide meaningful financial education to adults (for an interesting study concerning financial education and bankruptcy, see here). Although the 2005 amendments to the U.S. Bankruptcy Code incorporate a consumer education component, that requirement has become little more than the potential debtor sitting in front of a computer screen and answering a few questions in order to be able to file her bankruptcy petition (for other perspectives, see here, here and here; for an excellent study regarding the impact of the 2005 amendments on consumer debtors, see here). I hope that as the economy recovers, so too do our financial education initiatives  (see here and here) so that more individuals have a real chance at sustainable financial health.

  January 5, 2011 at 9:54 am  Tags: Bankruptcy, Education, financial crisis  Posted in: Bankruptcy   Print This Post   2 Comments

Creative Reconstruction

posted by Michelle Harner

In my opening post, I referenced the slow pace of change and how it can be exceedingly painful for individual consumers. I want to follow up on that concept in the business context, where slow change—or the failure to change at all—can be fatal.

Consider, for example, Borders, which recently announced that it was suspending payments to vendors and trying to refinance its debt obligations (see here and here). Borders, like its competitor Barnes & Noble, is struggling to compete with big box retailers that offer steep discounts on traditional books and the growing popularity of e-Books (see here, here and here). Also like many retailers, Borders was hit hard by the economic recession (see here).

Some may say that Borders is a victim of the recession and creative destruction. And that may, in part, be accurate. (For interesting perspectives on the utility of recessions and creative destruction, see here and here.) But anyone who follows the retail industry or is an avid reader had some sense that this was coming (see here, here and here). So why didn’t Borders’ management? Or rather, why didn’t they react more quickly to the changing market and economy?

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  January 4, 2011 at 9:46 am  Tags: Corporate Law, Current Events, financial crisis  Posted in: Bankruptcy   Print This Post   6 Comments

Treasury’s Prime Directive: Protect the Banks

posted by Frank Pasquale

Adam Levitin has been one of the most courageous and compelling commentators on the financial crisis. So it’s not much of a surprise to see this report on his latest testimony before the Senate Banking Committee:

First off, he lamented the fact that we have been holding hearings like this since 2007. “Every year we have another set of hearings, and you can add 2 million foreclosures” to the bottom line. Nothing gets fixed, despite all kinds of documented evidence that the banks and servicers have committed fraud. Levitin’s position is that the servicers should be banned from the loan modification business entirely, because they don’t have any interest in it except as a profit-maximization scheme, and they have massive conflicts of interest that cut against doing right by the borrowers (and even the investors for whom they work).

Levitin said that we don’t have the full data sets from the servicers, or any comprehensive data to see whether there is a full-on crisis of unclear title and improper mortgage assignment. In other words, we don’t quite know the full extent of the problem. Levitin said, essentially, “The federal regulators don’t want to get info from servicers, because then they’d have to do something about it.” They don’t want to recognize the scope of the problem because it would require them to act. And Levitin in particular singled out the Treasury Department. “The prime directive coming out of Treasury is ‘protect the banks’ and don’t force them to recognize their losses.”

While I’m sure the FCIC will issue a nuanced report on the web of causes behind the foreclosure crisis, Levitin sees the spider. It looks like courts are beginning to identify it, too. As Kate Berry reported in the American Banker,
Read the rest of this post »

  November 20, 2010 at 1:50 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law, Securities, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

CELS V: The Year of the Experiment

posted by Dave Hoffman

For the last several years, I’ve posted recaps of the Annual Empirical Studies Conference.  (See me, @ Cornell, @ USC).  This year, as promised, will be no different.  Yale hosted CELS V, and the committee did a bang up job: the food was tasty; there were no technical snafus of note; and the panels appeared to have a high degree of internal validity & congruence. Richard Brooks, Alan Gerber, Dan Kahan, Yair Listokin, Tracey Meares, and (especially) Roberta Romano are all due a round of applause, or, better yet, supersized computer monitors so they can see their data better.  In this post, I’m going to provide a running diary of the conference.  It will be like you were there with me, except you don’t have to suffer through my bouts of social anxiety!

Unfortunately, I missed the hottest ticket of the conference, Bruce Ackerman’s commentary on Law/Versteeg’s The Evolution and Ideology of Global Constitutionalism.  From all reports, Ackerman said something like: “wrong questions, wrong data, wrong theory,” and then imploded in frustration.  Instead of watching those fireworks, I was watching Yair Listokin present The Meaning of Contractual Silence: A Field Experiment [Here’s an older version of the paper].  Listokin ran a field experiment selling ipods on ebay, some with a warranty, some as-is, and some silent on the warranty term. He found that individuals paid attention to the contract, and there was some evidence that the UCC default was about what they thought silence meant.  As he admitted, there were problems with the design of the study – particularly, (1) small & skewed samples; and (2) a lack of clarity about how much buyers know about ebay’s unique and self-contained dispute resolution system.  As someone remarked after the presentation, it would have been interesting had Listokin sold all the customers bad ipods (instead of good ones) and studied how the contract terms influenced behavior post-“breach”.  Then again, who needs that IRB hassle?

Read the rest of this post »

  November 7, 2010 at 1:20 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Behavioral Law and Economics, Conferences, Contract Law & Beyond, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law   Print This Post   4 Comments

Mad Glee-actica: The Virtues of Extreme Recycling

posted by Jonathan Lipson

I don’t watch much TV.  So, I am hardly the person to make strong claims about its quality or trends.  That said, I find it fascinating that three of the best shows of the past few years—Battlestar Galactica, Madmen, and Glee—share a really odd structural feature:  They have all taken ridiculously bad ideas from cringe-able eras and turned them around completely, made them not only fresh, but evocative, disturbing, intriguing.

They are, in short, evidence of the virtues of extreme recycling.

Just imagine the pitch meeting for Galactica:  We’ll take what has to have been one of the dumbest pop-culture packing peanuts ever and make it stronger, faster, better:  How about an allegory about civil liberties and faith after 9/11 using Cylons and vats of goo?

Or what about Madmen:  Let’s explore the most virulent cancers on our culture with lovingly pornographic attention to detail, to demonstrate the complex symbiosis among banality, beauty, evil and exculpation.  Madmen is the money shot of commodity fetishism, proving once again the truth of Chomsky’s admonition that if you want to learn what’s wrong with capitalism, don’t read The Nation, read the Wall Street Journal.

And Glee?  Well, all I can say is:  Don’t Stop Believing.

Which may lead you to this question:  No one really takes the “and everything else” part of CoOps’s desktop mantra seriously, so what the frak does this have to do with law? Read the rest of this post »

  November 2, 2010 at 10:25 am  Tags: Bankruptcy, battlestar galactica, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, dodd-frank, glee, good faith, lender liability, madmen, shadow bankruptcy  Posted in: Bankruptcy, Contract Law & Beyond, Corporate Finance, Just for Fun, Movies & Television   Print This Post   One Comment

SEC Should Calm Markets, Ahead of Possible Audit Crisis

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

If you thought the 2008 credit crisis that temporarily froze global debt markets wrought havoc, watch out for the next shoe to drop.  At stake is the viability of global equity and other financial markets that could freeze if one of the four large auditing firms goes extinct.

And the existence of one of them, Ernst & Young, is threatened, as it faces the prospect of billion dollar liability for botched audits of Lehman Brothers, the defunct investment bank struggling in bankruptcy. It is an eerie echo of the fate of erstwhile big auditing firm Arthur Andersen, which dissolved after its culpability in 2001’s Enron fraud emerged.

Today, only four auditing firms have the resources and expertise to audit the vast majority of thousands of large public corporations. If one of those dissolved, its clients would have to scramble to find a replacement. Some of the remaining three lack requisite expertise for some of those corporations and others would be disqualified from auditing due to consulting work they do for them.

The result would be hundreds, possibly thousands, of large corporations who could not get their financial statements audited as required by US federal securities law. Stock markets could go berserk, along with other financial markets. The costs now, of moving from four firms to three, would dwarf those incurred when Andersen’s dissolution moved the total from five to four.

It does not appear that the US government, specifically its Securities and Exchange Commission, has any plans to deal with this prospect. It should. And it should announce them promptly to get ahead of any market crisis the failure of E&Y, or of the other three, would wreak. 

If not, the credit crisis of 2008 will look mild in comparison. After all, the credit crisis was readily addressed by government pumping enormous amounts of capital to rejuvenate liquidity; an auditing crisis cannot by solved by throwing money at it. Read the rest of this post »

  March 15, 2010 at 9:22 am   Posted in: Accounting, Bankruptcy, Corporate Finance, Current Events, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   One Comment

Wedding Repo

posted by Nate Oman

Each year, when I teach reposession in my secured transaction class, I show videos of repos and we discuss whether they comply with the dictates of Article 9.  This one is my new favorite.  It presents the question of whether a reposession that causes violence to the debtor by a third party constitutes a “breach of the peace.”  I love my job.

  March 10, 2010 at 11:43 am   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Consumer Protection Law, Contract Law & Beyond   Print This Post   8 Comments

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