financial regulation – The Surly Subgroup

Professor Cary Martin Shelby (DePaul) is presenting “Closing the Hedge Fund Loophole: The SEC as the Primary Regulator of Systemic Risk” at BC Law School’s Regulation and Markets Workshop today. The abstract:

The 2008 financial crisis sparked a flurry of regulatory activity and enforcement in an attempt to reign in activity by banks, but other institutions have also been identified as potentially threatening to the stability of the financial markets. In particular, several empirical studies have revealed that systemic risk can be created and transmitted by hedge funds. In response to the risk created by hedge funds, Congress granted the Financial Stability Oversight Council (“FSOC”) authority under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 to designate hedge funds as Systemically Important Financial Institutions (“SIFIs”). Such a designation would automatically result in stringent capital constraints and limitations on liquidity risk on these non-bank institutions. Yet in over six years since FSOC has been granted this authority, it has failed to identify even one hedge fund as a SIFI. In the face of massive resistance and deregulatory initiatives introduced under the Trump administration, it is highly unlikely to do so in the near future. The inability of FSOC to regulate systemically harmful funds is particularly troubling because several post-financial crisis studies have revealed that systemic risk can still be created and transmitted by hedge funds. Given FSOC’s inability to close this hedge fund loophole, this Article argues that Congress should explore appointing the SEC as the primary regulator of hedge funds because: (1) hedge funds can still pose a systemic threat to the economy; (2) the transparency framework inherent in the federal securities laws can supply a more effective means for mitigating systemic risk than the prudential framework currently mandated for SIFIs; and (3) appointing the SEC in this regard would reduce the fragmentation of the current regulatory structure which has been extended and complicated by the creation of FSOC. Although the federal securities laws are typically used to promote investor protection, this Article posits that enhancing transparency to hedge fund counterparties and investors can decrease systemic risk by empowering such market participants to better protect themselves against risk. Enhancing protection in this manner could in-turn weed out systemically harmful funds from the marketplace, without imposing the severe capital constraints that would be mandated under FSOC’s model.

If you’re an academic in the Boston area and would like to join us, please send me an email.

Shu Yi Oei

UPDATE 9/19/17: I blogged more about Omarova & Hockett’s National Investment Authority suggestion over on Taxprof Blog. You can read the post here.

Today, Boston College Law School welcomes Professor Saule Omarova (Cornell) as the first presenter in our inaugural Regulation and Markets Workshop Series. The paper (with Robert Hockett, also of Cornell) is entitled “Private Wealth and Public Goods: A Case for a National Investment Authority.” It’s available on SSRN.

Here’s the abstract:

The American Presidential election of 2016 was won under the rhetorical banner of returning America to its past productive glory. Any such undertaking presents an extraordinary challenge, demanding a correspondingly extraordinary institutional response. This Article proposes precisely such a response. It designs and advocates a new public instrumentality – a National Investment Authority (“NIA”) – charged with the critical task of devising and implementing a comprehensive long-term development strategy for the United States.

Patterned in part after the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation, in part after modern sovereign wealth funds, and in part after private equity and venture capital firms, the NIA is an inherently hybrid, public-private entity that combines the unique strengths of public instrumentalities – their vast scale, lengthy investment horizons, and explicit backing by the public’s full faith and credit – with the micro-informational advantages of private market actors. By creatively adapting familiar tools of financial and legal engineering, the NIA overcomes obstacles that ordinarily impede or discourage private investment in critically necessary and even transformative public infrastructure goods. By channeling presently speculative private capital back into the real-economy, moreover, the NIA plays an important role in enhancing the resilience and stability of the U.S. and global financial systems.

The Article makes original contributions not only to contemporary policy debates over how to revive America’s productive prowess and bring its financial system back into the service of the real economy, but also to current theoretical understandings of “public goods” and how to provide them. It offers a more complete and coherent account of such goods as solutions to collective action problems that pervade decentralized markets, hence as goods that can be supplied only through exercises of collective agency. The NIA proposal advanced in the Article operationalizes this theoretical insight by elaborating a specific institutional form that such collective agency can take.

The paper is really interesting and I have many swirling thoughts. I’ll say more after the workshop.