Yearly Archives: 2014

An IPO’s Impact on Rival Firms

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Monday, September 15, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Matthew Spiegel, Professor of Finance at Yale University, and Heather Tookes, Professor of Finance at Yale University.

An initial public offering (IPO) is a major event in the life of any firm. But what does an IPO imply for the industry’s future? In our paper, An IPO’s Impact on Rival Firms, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we take a structural approach that allows different industries to progress in different ways post IPO. If one is forced to make a sweeping generalization, then this paper finds an IPO augurs in an era of reduced profits and greater consumer mobility within an industry. Unlike a static model, a structural model’s parameters produce implications about magnitudes rather than just signs. This permits one to assess whether the estimates are economically “reasonable in a straightforward manner.”

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Risk Governance: Banks Back to School

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Sunday, September 14, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Dan Ryan, Leader of the Financial Services Advisory Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and is based on a PwC publication.

On September 2, 2014, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”) finalized its risk governance framework for large banks and thrifts (“Guidelines”) that was proposed in January 2014. [1] The Guidelines formalize the heightened risk management standards that the OCC has been communicating through the supervisory process for several years, but do so somewhat more flexibly than the January proposal (“proposal”) did. Although many firms have been working to enhance their risk management programs to meet the proposal and supervisory communications, most still have work to do in order to meet the Guidelines’ requirements.

The Guidelines maintain the proposal’s emphasis on risk governance at the bank level to ensure safety and soundness, and affords the OCC greater flexibility (prescribed under regulations) to take enforcement actions in response to a bank’s compliance failure. The responsibility to oversee risk management remains with the Board of Directors which retains its ultimate risk governance oversight role; however, the Guidelines clarify that the Board need not take on responsibility for day-to-day managerial duties as the proposal had suggested.

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Liabilities Under the Federal Securities Laws

Posted by Paul Vizcarrondo, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, on
Saturday, September 13, 2014
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Paul Vizcarrondo is a partner in the Litigation Department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz specializing in corporate and securities litigation and regulatory and white collar criminal matters. This post is based on the introduction of a Wachtell Lipton memorandum by Mr. Vizcarrondo; the complete publication is available here.

This post deals with certain of the liability provisions of the federal securities laws: §§ 11, 12, 15 and 17 of the Securities Act of 1933 (the “Securities Act”), and §§ 10, 18 and 20 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the “Exchange Act”). It does not address other potential sources of liability and sanction, such as federal mail and wire fraud statutes, state fraud statutes and common law remedies, RICO and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s (“SEC”) disciplinary powers.

On December 22, 1995, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the “Reform Act” or “PSLRA”) became law after the Senate overrode President Clinton’s veto. Pub. L. No. 104-67, 109 Stat. 737 (1995). Where relevant, this post discusses changes and additions that the PSLRA made to the liability provisions of the Securities Act and the Exchange Act.

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Does Corporate Governance Make Financial Reports Better or Just Better for Equity Investors?

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Friday, September 12, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Shai Levi of the Department of Accounting at Tel Aviv University, Benjamin Segal of the Department of Accounting at Fordham University and The Hebrew University, and Dan Segal of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliyah and Singapore Management University. This post is part of the Delaware law series, which is cosponsored by the Forum and Corporation Service Company; links to other posts in the series are available here.

Financial reports should provide useful information to both shareholders and creditors, according to U.S. accounting principles. However, directors of corporations have fiduciary duties only toward equity holders, and those fiduciary duties normally do not extend to the interests of creditors. In our paper, Does Corporate Governance Make Financial Reports Better or Just Better for Equity Investors?, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine whether this slant in corporate governance biases financial reports in favor of equity investors. We show that the likelihood that firms will manipulate their reporting to circumvent debt covenants is higher when directors owe fiduciary duties only to equity holders, rather than when they owe fiduciary duties also to creditors. Covenants limit the amount of new debt that the firm issues, for example, and by that reduce bankruptcy risk, and allow creditors to avoid bankruptcy costs, and to recover more from the borrowing firm in case it approaches insolvency. When managers manipulate financial reports to circumvent these debt covenants, they transfer wealth from creditors to shareholders. Our results suggest that when corporate governance is designed to protect only equity holders, firms’ financial reports serve equity holders’ interests at the expense of other stakeholders. We find that when the legal regime requires directors to consider creditors’ interests, firms are less likely to use structured transactions designed to skirt debt covenant limits, particularly if the board of directors of the firm is independent.

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After the Deal: Fannie, Freddie and the Financial Crisis Aftermath

Posted by June Rhee, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, September 11, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Steven Davidoff Solomon, Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and David T. Zaring, Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

In After the Deal: Fannie, Freddie and the Financial Crisis Aftermath, we offer a solution to the problem of what to do with the profits being made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the subject of a dispute between the government, which has declared that it will keep those profits, and the shareholders of common and preferred stock left behind after the firms were quasi-nationalized, who have sought, in court, a share of them.

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Senator Schumer’s Anti-Inversion Bill

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, September 11, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Neil Barr, partner and co-head of the Tax Department at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, and is based on a Davis Polk client memorandum by Mr. Barr, Rachel D. Kleinberg, and Michael Mollerus.

A draft of the bill that is being considered by Senator Schumer (D-NY) to reduce some of the economic incentives for corporate inversions was made publicly available yesterday. Senator Schumer has indicated that, while the proposed bill is still the subject of discussion and is subject to change, he intends to introduce the bill into the Senate this week. The following is a summary of the provisions in the proposed bill as it currently stands.

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Rolling Back the Repo Safe Harbors

Posted by Mark Roe, Harvard Law School, on
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
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Mark Roe is the David Berg Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches bankruptcy and corporate law. This post is based on an article co-authored by Professor Roe, Ed Morrison, Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Sontchi for the District of Delaware. All three are members of the Advisory Committee on Derivatives, Financial Contracts and Safe Harbors, which is working with the ABI Commission to Study the Reform of Chapter 11. The article was presented at the Federal Reserve’s recent conference on Wholesale Funding Markets.

Ed Morrison, Judge Christopher Sontchi and I recently posted to SSRN our article recommending a major narrowing of the repo safe harbors, after presenting it at the Federal Reserve’s recent conference on Wholesale Funding Markets in which the Boston Fed president warned of the dangers in the repo market. Overall, we conclude that the Bankruptcy Code has aggressively and unwisely sought to regulate market liquidity and systemic risk, with the Code’s “safe harbors” from the normal bankruptcy machinery largely backfiring during the financial crisis. The sounder policy would be to limit the repo safe harbors to U.S. Treasury repos and repos of similarly liquid government securities.

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Cyber Security and Cyber Governance: Federal Regulation and Oversight—Today and Tomorrow

Posted by Paul Ferrillo, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, on
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
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Paul A. Ferrillo is counsel at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP specializing in complex securities and business litigation. This post is based on an article authored by Mr. Ferrillo and David J. Schwartz.

In our June 4, 2014 article on cyber security and cyber governance [1] we noted that for many reasons, boards of directors and executives of U.S. companies needed to reexamine how they protect (and respond to the successful hacking of) their most critical intellectual property and customer information. One of the reasons was that all signs out of Washington, D.C. pointed towards increasing federal regulation and oversight of cyber security for public and private companies, and particularly for those in the financial services sector. Further, we foresaw not only heightened scrutiny from regulators, but increasing class action litigation, with plaintiffs accusing boards and management of not taking the appropriate steps to protect company and client data. Our predictions were correct on all fronts.

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Correcting Some of the Flaws in the ABS Market

Posted by Luis A. Aguilar, Commissioner, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, on
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
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Luis A. Aguilar is a Commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This post is based on Commissioner Aguilar’s remarks at a recent open meeting of the SEC; the full text, including footnotes, is available here. The views expressed in the post are those of Commissioner Aguilar and do not necessarily reflect those of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the other Commissioners, or the Staff.

Today [August 27, 2014] the Commission takes an important step to protect investors and promote capital formation, by enhancing the transparency of asset-backed securities (“ABS”) and by increasing the accountability of issuers of these securities. The securitization market is critical to our economy and can provide liquidity to nearly all the major economic sectors, including the automobile industry, the consumer credit industry, the leasing industry, and the commercial lending and credit markets.

Given the importance of this market, let’s also remember why we are here and the magnitude of the crisis in the ABS market. At the end of 2007, the ABS market consisted of more than $7 trillion of mortgage-backed securities and nearly $2.5 trillion of other outstanding ABS. However, by the fall of 2008, the securitization market had completely seized up. For example, in 2006 and 2007, new issuances of private-label residential mortgage-backed securities (“RMBS”) totaled $686 billion and $507 billion, respectively. In 2008, private-label RMBS issuance dropped to $9 billion, and flat-lined in 2009.

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How Efficient is Sufficient? Securities Litigation Post-Halliburton

Posted by June Rhee, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Bradford Cornell at California Institute of Technology.

In its recent decision in Halliburton Co., et al. v Erica P. John Fund, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legal standard for reliance in Rule 10b-5 securities fraud class actions that it had established some 25 years ago in Basic, Inc. v. Levinson. This standard, known as the fraud-on-the market doctrine, created a rebuttable presumption that plaintiffs relied on the integrity of the market price if they can establish that the market for that security was efficient. Defendants can rebut this presumption in several ways, including showing that the market for the security was not efficient or that the security’s price was not affected by the misrepresentations at issue. In delivering its ruling, the Halliburton Court noted that market efficiency is not a binary, yes-or-no proposition but is instead a matter of degree, pointing out that “a public, material misrepresentation might not affect a stock’s price even in a generally efficient market.” (Halliburton, 573 U.S. ___ at 10.)

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