Financial Institutions

Our former co-blogger, Senator Elizabeth Warren, delivered an incredibly important speech yesterday laying out the work still to be done on financial reform. This speech is a bigger deal than Senator Warren's Antonio Weiss speech or her famous Citibank speech. This speech is a blueprint for Dodd-Frank 2.0.  It lays out a detailed vision of the challenges for reform work going forward:

The Wall Street Journal ran a story today about H. Rodgin Cohen, the Senior Chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell and "one of Wall Street's top lawyers" decrying "the myth of regulatory capture." All I can say is wow. That's some chutzpah. 

I'm thrilled that Jay Westbrook has finally come into blogosphere with his posts on Single-Point-of-Entry.  I've blogged a little on SPOE already, but I want to highlight what I still think are two critical problems with SPOE.

In an earlier post I described the FDIC’s proposed SPOE approach to resolution of SIFI banks and other financial institutions under Title II of Dodd-Frank. That post discussed two of the three components of SPOE: control of the process by the regulator and no bailout for management or owners. This post lays out the role of the third component, the “forlorn hope” debt.

MBS investors suffered a serious legal blow a couple of months back when the Second Circuit held that the Trust Indenture Act of 1939 doesn't apply to MBS.