Archive for the ‘Corporate Finance’ Category
Against Politics and Finance in Accounting
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
An old joke says every financial crisis needs an accounting culprit to blame. The current crisis may be attributable instead to the dominance of modern finance theory and subordination of traditional accounting principles. Two generations of finance theorists—in business and law schools—developed elaborate models to measure and manage risk in a theoretical world of efficient markets where accounting is not relevant.
Yet two strange twists have arisen—one showing the intellectual limits of the finance story and the other the dark art of making accounting into a political issue. Both concern debate over how to measure financial assets on a balance sheet—the so-called fair value debate.
First, for decades, proponents of modern finance theory urged standard setters to direct asset measurements using fair value rather than applying traditional accounting conventions. The prescription was based on assertions that emphasized the reliability of efficient markets to reveal relevant values. Proponents said traditional accounting conventions, using acquisition cost adjusted over time, were comparatively impoverished.
Amid the crisis, those same people shift their stance, now saying fair value measures in stressful markets are either misleading or put downward pressure on values that could render owners of impaired assets, especially banks, insolvent. On its face, this is an admission about the limits of markets to reveal reliable asset values, that modern finance theory is impoverished.
Second, without opining on the merits of measuring assets at fair value or using historical cost accounting conventions, this issue, once again, is turning accounting standard setting into a political expression rather than a professional one. Politicians in Congress, under heavy bank lobbying, pressured the US standard setter [the Financial Accounting Standards Board] to adopt bank-friendly approaches to asset measurement. Now, Congressional bills (here, for example, and noted here) contemplate empowering politicians and/or a new federal agency to oversee US accounting standard setting, equipping them with veto rights over any accounting standards the political power consensus disfavors.
November 16, 2009 at 11:48 am
Posted in: Accounting, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Current Events, Politics
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Barney Frank’s Bad Idea
posted by Nate Oman
Last month Barney Frank unveiled the House plans to fix the financial services industry. One of the provisions (section 1501) will require that any creditor who originates a loan to retain some of the ultimate risk of non-repayment of the loan. The provision is an apparently sensible response to the pathologies in the originate-to-distribute (OTD) model of mortgage lending that we saw at the height of the subprime boom. The basic idea is that originators were insufficiently incentivized to monitor the credit worthiness of applicants, and therefore manufactured a huge volume of ultimately toxic financial assets. The idea is to fix the problem of agency costs by aligning the incentives of loan originators with loan holders. Despite the plausibility of the proposal, I think that it is ultimately a bad idea.
First, it is a bad idea because it addresses a symptom rather than a cause of financial rot. The problem with the mortgage-brokers-as-villains narrative is that it fails to explain why the brokers could do a land office business selling toxic junk to a voracious secondary market. One explanation – the one implicit in section 1501 – is that brokers were taking advantage of purchasers, selling them supposedly sound financial assets that the purchasers were too unsophisticated or blinded by greed to realize were junk. To state this assumption explicitly is to see its limitations. The purchasers of mortgages were not unsophisticated consumers or little old ladies entrusting their savings to fast talking swindlers. These were a bunch of extremely wealthy, extremely sophisticated, extremely large financial institutions. It is rather unlikely that these guys were “fooled” by the mortgage brokers.
A more plausible story, in my opinion, looks at the underlying supply and demand for credit. First, why did the mortgage brokers go into the subprime market? At least in part the answer is that they could afford to do so. With the short term wholesale funding on which they relied to originate loans costing them essentially nothing, it was extremely inexpensive to originate loans. At the same time, the massive subsidization of the subprime market through implicit guarantees to the Fannie and Freddie, the so-called “Greenspan Put” on which Wall Street relied, and various (admittedly much smaller) direct subsidies created a massive demand for the assets churned out by the mortgage brokers. Add to this the impact of monetary and Chinese balance of payments factors on asset prices, and the notion that the subprime crisis was really the result of agency costs in the OTD model looks implausible. Absent macro-economic and regulatory distortions, I suspect that market competition and reputational sanctions are sufficient to keep the OTD brokers honest. Given those distortions, we have seen spectacular examples of those who did have skin in the game responding perversely to the perverse incentives with which they were presented. Read the rest of this post »
November 11, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Posted in: Consumer Protection Law, Contract Law & Beyond, Corporate Finance, Current Events, Uncategorized
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House Financial Committee Busy
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
The Staff of the House Financial Services Committee is extremely busy and doing a very good job of keeping its role in the legislative process transparent. A reasonable run down of current activity in financial regulation reform appears here. (You can even sign up to get email alerts.)
These bills are elaborate, complex and defy tidy characterization. All are likely to change, some significantly, as the legislative process grinds along. The Senate Banking Committee is unlikely to produce anything equivalent until well into November.
In general, however, together the House FSC’s work would make for sweeping change. The bills would:
(1) create three new federal agencies: a Federal Oversight Council, a Consumer Financial Protection Agency and an Office of Federal Insurance;
(2) considerably expand powers of the Securities Exchange Commission, including by subjecting rating agencies to considerable regulation and oversight by the SEC plus eliminate an exemption to the Investment Company Act of 1940 for private financial advisors.; and
(3) expand the mandate and powers of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission concerning regulation of derivative securities.
These pending Committee steps, of course, are in addition to bills the House passed earlier this year, including the summer’s Corporate and Financial Institution Compensation Fairness Act of 2009, embracing shareholder say on executive compensation to a certain extent.
At this link, you can access pending bills totaling just about 1,000 pages. Following is an additional breakdown: Read the rest of this post »
October 28, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Posted in: Consumer Protection Law, Corporate Finance, Current Events, Securities, Securities Regulation
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Smart or Not So Smart Money; The Limits on Derivatives and Regulating Them
posted by Deven Desai
The New York Times op-ed by Calvin Trillin, Wall Street Smarts, has a parable-like quality with the two characters meeting and exchanging wisdom. The lesson offered by the wiseman: “The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” The piece goes on to explain why that is a good explanation. It seems that the not-so-smart sat at the top of the heap and ran the companies: “Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like that.” There is also an claim about what is enough and what is greed in this tale. I leave it to others to debate or verify these ideas (our own Mr. Cunningham has been a favorite for me on these issues). Now, a paper by some folks at Princeton may show that not even the smart guys knew what they were doing.
As Andrew Appel explores in his post Intractability of Financial Derivatives, the computer science world’s Intractability Theory may better explain the derivative world than other theories. (the theory is used for DRM, cryptography, and more). The paper is Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products (pdf) by Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak, Markus Brunnermeier, and Rong Ge.
For those who are interested in the topic and/or understand the math and theory behind the risk shifting involved in this area, check out Andrew’s post. He does a great job explaining how the paper applies to a CDO (collateralized debt obligation). If you need a little more to understand why this paper and its ideas are important, consider Andrew’s take away
In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn’t know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem (”densest subgraph”). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can’t have enough computational power to do the analysis.
Arora et al. show it’s even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his “senior tranche”), he can’t prove that that tampering occurred: he can’t prove that the distribution of lemons wasn’t random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs.
UPDATE: It appears from the comments to Andrew’s post that CDO and derivatives are not precisely the same thing. In addition, the comments explore the limits of the study. It is a good discussion.
ALSO check out the FAQ for the paper. It addresses many issues that the initiated may want to probe.
October 18, 2009 at 9:17 am
Tags: computer science, derivatives, securities law
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Securities, Securities Regulation
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Lipson on Bankruptcy, the Inky and Irony
posted by Dave Hoffman
Our Roving Bankruptcy Correspondent
I asked Jonathan Lipson, who previously owned the credit crisis for us, for his thoughts on a really interesting story involving the Philadelphia Inquirer’s bankruptcy process. His (pretty cool, even for non-bankruptcy geeks) thoughts follow:
Like other markets for company control, the one created by Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code is largely about information: If you control the story, there’s a good chance you will control the outcome.
So it’s not surprising that The Philadelphia Inquirer has used its own storied assets—the paper and website–to try to sell readers on management’s plan to save the company from rapacious hedge funds and, in their words, “keep it local.”
As you may recall, Brian Tierney, who owns an advertising firm in the Philadelphia suburbs, acquired The Inquirer and its related properties (The Daily News and Philly.com, their collective website), from the McClatchy papers in 2006 for about half a billion dollars.
Like several other newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune, The Inquirer could not service its massive acquisition debt. Thus, in February 2009, the paper (and its affiliates) filed a Chapter 11 case in Philadelphia. In August, management filed a proposed reorganization plan where Tierney (who manages the papers and owns some equity) and some of his supporters would buy the papers out of bankruptcy, for about $90 million, leaving most large creditors—i.e., the ones holding the acquisition debt–with a very small recovery. The management buyout would be subject to higher and better offers.
According to the official Creditors’ Committee in the case, the Inquirer’s “keep it local” campaign is designed to make sure there are no better offers. Management’s ad campaign warns of dire consequences “[i]f out-of-towners were to seize control.” Allegedly hailing from such illiterate venues as New York, Beverly Hills “and even Lausanne, Switzerland, these out of towners would feel little commitment to, or understanding of, [Philadelphia’s] local non-profit needs.”
September 8, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Posted in: Bankruptcy, Corporate Finance, Current Events
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Negligent Misrepresentation and Rating Agencies
posted by Gerard Magliocca
One of the leading cases in the Unfair Competition course that I’m teaching this semester is Cardozo’s opinion in 
Ultramares Corp. v. Touche. Ultramares rejected the creation of a negligent misrepresentation action (akin to fraud). The case involved an accounting firm that negligently audited the books of a company. That negligent “clean bill of health” led another firm to extend a loan that went bad. The lender then sued the accountants for damages. Cardozo reasoned that this theory would “expose accountants to a liability in an indeterminate amount for an indeterminate time to an indeterminate class. The hazards of a business conducted on these terms are so extreme as to enkindle doubt whether a flaw ma not exist in the implication of a duty that exposes to these consequences.”
September 2, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Posted in: Corporate Finance
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From Antitrust to Anti-Systemic Risk
posted by Frank Pasquale
The “optimal size and complexity of developing countries’ financial systems” has been hotly debated in the economics community. Writing for the Harvard Business Review & Boston Globe, Duncan Watts focuses on our own dilemmas in a provocative account of complex systems:
[G]lobally interconnected and integrated financial networks just may be too complex to prevent crises like the current one from reoccurring. . . . A 2006 report co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the National Academy of Sciences concluded that even defining systemic risk was beyond the scope of any existing economic theory. Actually managing such a thing would be harder still, if only because the number of contingencies that a systemic risk model must anticipate grows exponentially with the connectivity of the system.
So if the complexity of our financial systems exceeds that of even the most sophisticated risk models, how can government regulators hope to manage the problem? There is no simple solution, but one approach is close to what the government already does when it decides that some institutions are “too big to fail,” and therefore must be saved – a strategy that, as we have seen recently, can cost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. . . .
An alternate approach is to deal with the problem before crises emerge. On a routine basis, regulators could review the largest and most connected firms in each industry, and ask themselves essentially the same question that crisis situations already force them to answer: “Would the sudden failure of this company generate intolerable knock-on effects for the wider economy?” If the answer is “yes,” the firm could be required to downsize, or shed business lines in an orderly manner until regulators are satisfied that it no longer poses a serious systemic risk. Correspondingly, proposed mergers and acquisitions could be reviewed for their potential to create an entity that could not then be permitted to fail.
Of course, our system has been headed in precisely the opposite direction, largely thanks to the “best and brightest” now at Treasury and the Fed. As Simon Johnson puts it, we “pay too much deference to the expertise and presumed wisdom of a sector that screwed up massively.”
July 20, 2009 at 8:57 am
Posted in: Antitrust, Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law
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Rating Agencies: Privilege Without Responsibility
posted by Frank Pasquale
First Amendment fundamentalist Floyd Abrams is back on the attack, now in the service of the credit rating agency S&P. He says that their ratings are essentially the same as an editorial — a position I looked at with some skepticism here. Editorials fail to receive the regulatory subsidy routinely channeled to raters, via acts like the Secondary Mortgage Market Enhancement Act of 1984 and the Investment Company Act of 1940, and agencies like the National Credit Union Administration (all of which mandate the use of raters’ products). Abrams appears to want to let the raters get all the benefits of such government subvention, without the liability or extensive regulation it should naturally lead to.
On the Media has a great interview with Abrams, who vigorously defends the agencies’ actions:
[Interviewer] BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay, so first of all, explain to me why this is more like an editorial. To me it seems more like a clothing inspector, the people who leave the little number inside the clothing you buy. They leave their number so that if the zipper was put in backwards, for instance, they could theoretically take responsibility. Why are the ratings companies different from that?
FLOYD ABRAMS: Well, because the rating agencies use their models, use their heads, use their common sense, have ratings committees. They sit down and they come out with their best judgment as to what is likely to happen in the future about repayment of debt. And that is not subject to mathematical yes/no answers. It’s not the same as saying, my zipper is no good or a couch is no good. It’s not being an inspector. It’s not.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Fair enough. Let’s move away from that analogy and let’s go to one that attorney David Grais, who we just spoke to, came up with, that in many cases rating agencies want their ratings to be protected as opinion, like, say, a restaurant critic’s. But more often, he notes, they’re like critics who go into the kitchen, make the food and then come out and write about it. They help create these deals. And they have a financial stake in their own ratings ‘cause they’re paid by the very companies they rate, a seemingly obvious conflict of interest.
FLOYD ABRAMS: Rating agencies have analytic standards. They apply those standards. And, yes, they discuss with the entities that they’re rating why they’re doing what they’re doing. And if the entity asks them, well, you know, how come you’re giving us a triple BBB instead of a double AA, they tell them why. And if the entity wants to do things to get a higher rating, they can do them.
And it is not inappropriate, in my view, so long as they take good steps to deal with the potential for conflict of interest. It is not inappropriate that they get paid by the entities they rate. I mean, it is not conceptually that distinguishable from, you know, a large entity which puts big ads in – what, a motorcycle magazine and then they write about the motorcycles. Do they have to be careful? Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The fact of the matter here is that the ratings agencies, in this case, were so widely off the mark, ultimately, that it doesn’t seem to have been just a series of mistakes of judgment.
I really look forward to seeing how Abrams would deal with facts like these if similar revelations emerge about his own client:
[In the package of loans it was to rate,] Moody’s learned that [over 38 percent of the borrowers] did not provide written verification of their incomes. . . . On the plus side, Moody’s noted, 94 percent of those borrowers with adjustable-rate loans said their mortgages were for primary residences. “That was a comfort feeling,” [one analyst] said. Historically, people have been slow to abandon their primary homes. When you get into a crunch, she added, “You’ll give up your ski chalet first.”
Borrowers have no chance of repaying via income and assets? Assume a ski chalet! (Much like the classic economic approach of assuming a can opener.) As the Summary Report of Issues Identified in the Commission Staff’s Examinations of Select Credit Rating Agencies (by the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations of the SEC) noted in July 2008, none of the rating agencies had specific procedures for collateralized debt obligations–even though 17 CFR 240.17g-2 required them to make certain internal documents public, including procedures and methodologies they use to determine credit ratings.
Sadly, I think that, given the current state of the law, Abrams’s First Amendment arguments will do well in front of many courts. But as David Segal states in the NYT article, “The First Amendment is no defense against fraud, and that is what is alleged by many of the plaintiffs.” Segal notes that, “Against them, Mr. Abrams will argue that S.& P. was every bit as blindsided as nearly everyone else in the private sector and in the regulatory sphere.”
Here are a few quotes that appear to be from S&P:
1. Internal Email: “rating agencies continue to create [an] even bigger monster – the CDO [collateralized debt obligation] market. Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.”
2. Instant Message: “It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.”
These people don’t sound blindsided to me. Rather, they, like the three ratings agency CEOs who together earned $80 million themselves over the past 6 years, sound like people who knew exactly what they were doing: getting while the getting was good. If Abrams succeeds, he’ll be making that particular Wall Street strategy all the more foundational for America’s brave financial innovators.
But would a loss for S&P change anything? I really don’t know. What I do believe is that the US discourse on rating agencies would probably benefit from some input by scholars like John Quiggin, who argue that “Among the many challenges in reconstructing a sustainable system of global finance, the replacement of ratings issued by for-profit agencies with an alternative system, in which AAA ratings actually mean something, is among the most important.” Quiggin notes that the rating agencies are biased in many important ways:
[T]hey have a long-standing ideological bias against the public sector. This is reflected in the fact that state and local governments, which rarely default on their debt, are assessed far more stringently than corporate issuers. In the last year, thousands of private-sector securities issued with AAA ratings have been downgraded to junk, and many have subsequently gone into default.
By contrast, defaults on government debt have remained rare. One effect of the differential ratings practices of the agencies is that government borrowers have been forced to seek insurance from bond insurance companies such as AMBAC that are, in reality, less sound than the governments they are insuring.
Unfortunately, the 2006 Credit Rating Agency Reform Act specifically prohibited the SEC from regulating the “substance of the credit rating or the procedures and methodologies” used to calculate it. Reform measures proposed by the Obama administration have barely addressed the CRA’s. At the very least the government ought to be able to use FAIR v. Rumsfeld to insist on more responsible behavior (as Jennifer Chandler has argued, in another context, here). CRA’s should take the bitterness of regulation with the sweetness of regulatory subsidies.
I believe that as long as the US government provides a de facto regulatory subsidy to CRA’s, it should require them to factor into at least some of their ratings the full social value of the rated entity—not simply its likelihood to default. Ratings are often a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the state should harness their value to promote projects that improve the health, safety, security, and well-being of citizens. At the very least, the government should set up a “public option” in credit rating (akin to the proposed public option in health insurance) that is more transparent and accountable than extant credit raters. If the finance sector is going to grow as dependent on government help as the health care sector has, it should learn to accept the same web of standards and regulation that guarantee some minimal accountability for providers who accept government funds. Looking at the AHRQ and comparative effectiveness research could be a good place to start.
July 19, 2009 at 11:55 am
Posted in: Corporate Finance, First Amendment
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What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men?
posted by Dave Hoffman
When students, friends and family have asked me what I think “happened” to cause our current financial crisis, my response has been an embarrassed shrug. Embarrassed because (as a corporate law teacher) I’m expected to have clear answers. A shrug because the crisis doesn’t have a obvious anecdote or story that explains it, and lacks a clearly defined evil doer who might be plausibly blamed. The best candidate – who I’ve thrown out there to quiet persistent friends – is Joe Cassano, formerly head of AIG’s Financial Product’s Division, and the so-called “patient zero” in the crisis.
Now comes the myth-killer, Michael Lewis, with a must-read article in Vanity Fair. He starts by reminding us that “nearly a year after perhaps the most sensational corporate collapse in the history of finance, a collapse that, without the intervention of the government, would have led to the bankruptcy of every major American financial institution, plus a lot of foreign ones, too, A.I.G.’s losses and the trades that led to them still haven’t been properly explained.” And he then takes a crack at that problem, suggesting that AIG’s traders (i) made a bad (negligent?) bet on the likely course of the housing market, (ii) didn’t unwind their positions fast enough; (iii) fell victim to a liquidity crunch caused by covenants tied to their AAA rating; (iv) were made into a convenient villain by the media; and (v) like everyone else, were outsmarted by Goldman.
And how about Cassano? Here’s the key – and dispiriting – paragraph:
[T]he A.I.G. F.P. traders left behind, much as they despise him personally, refuse to believe Cassano was engaged in any kind of fraud. The problem is that they knew him. And they believe that his crime was not mere legal fraudulence but the deeper kind: a need for subservience in others and an unwillingness to acknowledge his own weaknesses. “When he said that he could not envision losses, that we wouldn’t lose a dime, I am positive that he believed that,” says one of the traders. The problem with Joe Cassano wasn’t that he knew he was wrong. It was that it was too important to him that he be right. More than anything, Joe Cassano wanted to be one of Wall Street’s big shots. He wound up being its perfect customer.
“A need for subservience in others and an unwillingness to acknowledge his own weaknesses.” The flip side of authority and confidence, and the hallmarks of an executive who has passed many gates in the corporate advancement tournament. The law lacks purchase on this kind of evil – if that is what it is.
July 7, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law
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“A great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
That’s how Matt Taibbi describes Goldman Sachs in the opening paragraph of his 12-page Rolling Stone article (which, as far as I can tell, is available online only here, in moderately annoying scanned form). From there, Taibbi picks up steam. For instance, we learn that:
The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into one giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where its going.
Yikes!
Is this just another crackpot conspiracy theory? (Paging Mr. Stein, Mr. Ben Stein.) Nay — Taibbi has give us proof of Goldman’s nefari-iety. It goes more or less along these lines: 1. Goldman survived the Great Depression. 2. Goldman made some savvy bets in the past ten years. 3. Goldman pays really big bonuses. Read the rest of this post »
June 26, 2009 at 11:51 am
Tags: financial crisis, goldman sachs, market, money, securities law
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Current Events, Securities, Securities Regulation
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Where are the Rating Agencies in the Financial Regulatory Overhaul?
posted by Frank Pasquale
Jonathan Stempel of Reuters notes that “rating agencies [were] largely spared” in the financial industry regulatory overhaul proposed by the Obama administration. Jonathan Macey of Yale critiques the oversight:
“The overall impact of existing and proposed regulatory changes on rating agencies is extraordinarily easy to summarize: They reward abject failure,” said Jonathan Macey, deputy dean of Yale Law School.
“Any credit rating agency that relies on an NRSRO rating [nationally recognized statistical rating organization pursuant to the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934], which is effectively a government subsidy, should be subject to lawsuits by investors,” he went on. “It should also be made clear to professional investors that it is not a defense or a sufficient discharge of their fiduciary duties to rely on credit ratings when assembling portfolios.”
Given my recent series of posts on the “public/private” divide, I was heartened to see Macey characterize the government licensure of rating agencies as a “subsidy.” As I noted in my 2007 post “From First Amendment Absolutism to Financial Meltdown?,” the agencies have used a “free expression” shield to protect against legal consequences for their incompetence, malfeasance, and conflicts of interests. Following the reasoning of FAIR v. Rumsfeld, Congress may be able to condition the “subsidy” of requiring investor reliance on ratings agencies’ work on ratings agencies’ willingness to give up First Amendment immunity from lawsuits.
Admittedly, Congress has gone in precisely the opposite direction in the recent past. In 2006, the Rating Agency Reform Act specifically prohibited the SEC from regulating the “substance of the credit rating or the procedures and methodologies.” We can only hope that current Congress is more serious about either really regulating this field, or getting out of the “implicit subsidy” business altogether.
June 19, 2009 at 8:27 am
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law
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You Would’ve Thought They Worked for Moo-dy’s
posted by Sarah Lawsky
If you were deciding whether to loan someone money, it would be very useful to know the chances that the person would pay you back. (For example, the higher the chance they would default, the more you would charge them to borrow the money.) Rating agencies–two dominant agencies are Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s (or “S&P”)–are supposed to provide lenders with that information. The less the risk of default on a particular financial instrument, the higher the rating. The rating agencies predict (or model) the risk, and if the rating agencies don’t do a good job, financial instruments’ market prices don’t reflect their actual value.
As others have discussed in a much more nuanced fashion, rating agencies may be partly to blame for the recent financial crisis. The agencies appear to have been more concerned about keeping their clients (those who issued the financial instruments) happy than rating financial instruments accurately. The ratings were too high, prices were too high, lenders and other purchasers of financial instruments didn’t anticipate default…and (to oversimplify) there’s your financial crisis.
But there appears to have been another market failure associated with rating agencies–a totally unexploited chance for profit.
June 2, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Posted in: Corporate Finance
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“We Own GM” and Other Rhetorical Illusions
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
Misleading talk continues to plague discussions of government’s financial intervention into private enterprise, including automotive, insurance and banking companies. Latest talk, centered at General Motors but applicable to AIG, Citigroup and others, is misuse of three abstract notions: taxpayer, ownership and investment.
Standard talk sees US government’s capital transfers from the federal purse to private corporations as resulting in “taxpayers owning investments” in these companies. The upshot of this speech is the illusion that (a) people who pay US federal income tax (b) now own a bit of these corporations and (c) are entitled to enjoy investment return from that. All these conceptions are misleading. Clinging to them will complicate the process of government rescue and revival at the heart of this effort. Read the rest of this post »
June 2, 2009 at 10:09 am
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Current Events, Law Talk
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Brooksley Born: Profile in Financial Courage
posted by Frank Pasquale
While public intellectuals like Richard Posner assure us that “no one could have foreseen” today’s financial crisis, many voices called for the types of sensible regulation that may well have prevented it. Today one of them, Brooksley Born, is being honored at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library with a Profile in Courage Award. It is given to “to one or more public officials who took a stand that took a lot of integrity and nerve.” Here is Born’s citation:
In 1998, as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Brooksley Born unsuccessfully tried to bring over-the-counter financial derivatives under the regulatory control of the CFTC. The government’s failure to regulate such financial deals has been widely criticized as one of the causes of the current financial crisis. In the booming economic climate of the 1990’s, Born battled other regulators in the Clinton Administration, skeptical members of Congress and lobbyists over the regulation of derivatives, warning that unregulated financial contracts such as credit default swaps could pose grave dangers to the economy.
Her efforts brought fierce opposition from Wall Street and from Administration officials who believed deregulation was essential to the extraordinary economic growth that was then in full bloom. Her adversaries eventually passed legislation prohibiting the CFTC from any oversight of financial derivatives during her term. She stepped down from the CFTC in 1999 and returned to a distinguished career in public interest law.
The silencing of Born was just one more sad consequence of the Clinton administration–whose tilt to Wall Street lobbies was almost indistinguishable from that of Reagan and the Bushes. As Frank Partnoy has said,
History already has shown that [Alan] Greenspan was wrong about virtually everything, and Brooksley was right . . . I think she has been entirely vindicated. . . . If there is one person we should have listened to, it was Brooksley.
May 18, 2009 at 12:23 am
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law, Uncategorized
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Toward Transparent Derivatives Trading
posted by Frank Pasquale
Could you describe the financial crisis in a sentence? Margaret Atwood’s description (in Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth) appears to me as good as any:
[This] scheme. . . boils down to the fact that some large financial institutions peddled mortgages to people who could not possibly pay the monthly rates and then put this snake-oil debt into cardboard boxes with impressive labels on them and sold them to institutions and hedge funds that thought they were worth something.
I’d only add one amendment, to recognize the last step in the agency problem: the products were sold by and to institutions whose managers believed that they could still pocket fees and bonuses without being liable to principals for gross malfeasance. As the former head of AIGFP enjoys his fortune, the joy in passing on the proverbial hot potato must daily bring a smile to his face.
As these black boxes continue to blow up, the WSJ Opinion page recently featured a proposal to open up some of them. Professors Viral Acharya and Robert Engle argue that “derivative trades should all be transparent,” in refreshingly plain English:
Most financial contracts are arrangements between two parties to deliver goods or cash in amounts and at times that depend upon uncertain future events. By their nature, they entail risk, but one kind of risk — “counterparty risk” — can be difficult to evaluate, because the information needed to evaluate it is generally not public. Put simply, a party to a financial contract might sign a second, similar financial contract with someone else — increasing the risk that it may be unable to meet its obligations on the first contract. So the actual risk on one deal depends on what other deals are being done. But in over-the-counter (OTC) markets — in which parties trade privately with each other rather than through a centralized exchange — it is not at all transparent what other deals are being done.
May 17, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law, Uncategorized
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Deconstructing the Put-Option State
posted by Nate Oman
Larry and David Zaring have a thoughtful piece making the case against an overly exhuberent regulatory response to the financial crisis. There is a lot of wisdom to what they say. At its bottom, however, it seems to me that the keygovernment failure lay not in our regulations but in our political culture. As Simon Johnson (of the must-read Baseline Scenario blog) observes in the most recent issue of The Atlantic, our current debacle looks less like Wall Street circa 1930 than Indonesia circa 1997. The problem is not that we are reaping the whirl-wind of unregulated markets run amok, but rather that we are reaping the whirl-wind of a system where politically powerful business actors get the up-side of huge risks, while they can push the downside on to the public. We are living in the put-option state.
May 9, 2009 at 1:55 am
Posted in: Bankruptcy, Corporate Finance, Politics, Uncategorized
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Hayek, the True Sale Doctrine, and the Origins of the Financial Crisis
posted by Nate Oman
Here is my theory du jour about the origins of the financial crisis, suggested by one of my students*: blame it all on the true sale doctrine or rather on its evisceration. Stick with me to the end, and I have some overly broad generalizations about expertise, property rights, and Hayek.
The “true sale doctrine” is not a staple of the law school curriculum. At best it makes a brief cameo in secured transactions and bankruptcy courses. Notwithstanding this academic obscurity, however, its failure may have had a big role in the current melt-down of the banking sector and with it the world economy. Here is the gist of the issue:
Securitization is the process by which financial assets (essentially promises to pay money in the future) are transferred from their original holder to a special purpose vehicle such as an LLC or business trust, which then issues securities entitling the holder to some fractional right to the income from the transferred assets. Hence, for example, a bank might transfer mortgage loans to an SPV, the SPV would then issue securities to investors, and the cash from the sale of these securities would flow back to the bank. The investors in the securities have two ultimately inconsistent goals.
March 31, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law
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How is Tom Barr Like Shane Battier: Or, Measuring Individuals’ Roles in Group Success
posted by Dave Hoffman
Michael Lewis recently published a Times Magazine story on NBA player Shane Battier. The article is largely an anecdotally driven portrait of Battier, a player who supposedly makes his teammates better and opposing players worse, while engrossing few individual gains. But the Houston Rockets, who employ Battier, recognize his value, because they’ve finally cracked the nut of regressing success in group sports. According to Lewis, the Rockets use a sophisticated plus-minus measure:
One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.”
The problem with the article is that it offers no perspective at all on how the Rockets tweak the statistic to make it useful and a competitive advantage. In that sense, the piece could be thought of as Moneyball III: This Time With No Data and No Human Interest. (Moneyball Had Data; Blind Side had a compelling story; this piece is unripe on both fronts.)
Nevertheless, in some quarters Lewis’s work has again caught the attention of legal innovators. Jim Chen, who has already opined that Deans should use a version of plus-minus to evaluate faculty performance, suggests that Battier is a promising case study: “the single factor that makes a great team player is the mirror image of the single factor that turns even the most productive scholar into a toxic Arschloch: selfishness.” To which an astute commentator responded: “If anything, a stats-driven evaluation process will almost certainly lead to the Battiers of academia being under-rewarded, rather than the reverse. Wouldn’t it be enough to reward those who just seem to distinguish themselves by their selflessness? . . . Note that, even within the NBA — in which it is much easier to do a plus/minus assessment — Battier gets undervalued by most teams, and if he weren’t still riding a six year contract would probably get paid a lot less even by the Rockets.”
March 2, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)
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President Obama Outlines Fin Reg Reform
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
Yesterday afternoon President Obama outlined his approach to financial regulation reform that is undoubtedly coming our way. He named the following seven goals
1. Enforce strict oversight of financial institutions that pose systemic risks
2. Strengthen markets so they can withstand both system-wide stress and failure of large firms
3. Encourage a financial system that is open and transparent.
4. Supervise financial products based on “actual data on how actual people make financial decisions”
5. Hold participants accountable for their actions, “starting at the top”
6. Overhaul regulations so they are comprehensive and free of gaps and do not result in regulatory competition
7. Recognize that the challenges are global
The President said: “Iif we all do our jobs, if we once again guide the market’s invisible hand with a higher principle, our markets will recover. . . . Our economy will once again thrive, and America will once again lead the world in this new century as it did in the last.”
The President also emphasized the following:
“The choice we face is not between some oppressive government-run economy or a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism. Rather, strong financial markets require clear rules of the road, not to hinder financial institutions, but to protect consumers and investors, and ultimately to keep those financial institutions strong. Not to stifle, but to advance competition, growth and prosperity. And not just to manage crises, but to prevent crises from happening in the first place, by restoring accountability, transparency and trust in our financial markets.”
Hat Tip: Don Marlais
Photo: Official White House Photo taken during the President’s remarks
February 26, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Posted in: Corporate Finance
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State Law Guidance for Treasury Investment Program
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
As the US Treasury Department continues to lend to or make senior equity investments in corporate America, especially its financial institutions, people debate whether those taxpayer investments should be accompanied by limits on investees’ right to pay cash dividends to common stockholders.
This is a fundamental issue in corporate finance, requiring mediation of a tension between senior investors, who want security of repayment, and common (junior) stockholders, who want periodic returns on their investment.
The balance and how to resolve it is reflected in state corporation law regulating dividends. In general, those laws provide a minimum level of protection to senior lenders and equity holders, restricting distributions to common stockholders to minimize bankruptcy risk, and assuring that a corporation has flexibility to make such distributions.
A review of state corporation law approaches may be useful to assess what policies Treasury should consider when investing taxpayer funds in senior loans or equity in corporate America. The review suggests that: (1) Treasury may go too far if it prohibits cash dividends altogether; and (2) tools it is developing to assess investee’s positions, called stress tests, routinely used under some state statutes to determine the legality of distributions to common stockholders, should be applied to determine, on a case by case basis, to what extent, if any, government investment of taxpayer funds should be conditioned on investees’ restricting dividends on common stock.
February 14, 2009 at 10:48 am
Posted in: Corporate Finance
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