News Topic: Too Big to Fail (TBTF)

Anna Gelpern, Stephen Lubben and I have an article in The American Prospect entitled The Debt Limit Is Unconstitutional—but Not for the Reason You Think . ... Read full article

Last week I did a post about how the FDIC as receiver for Silicon Valley Bank probably doesn't have a claim against SVB Financial Group, the holdco of the bank. I got some pushback on that (including from a former student!), but I'm sticking to ... Read full article

I have an op-ed in ProMarkets about how Apple leverages control of the iPhone's NFC chip to push the dominance of its platform into new areas that let it hoover up more consumer data. The NFC (near field communication) chip is what lets the iPhone do ... Read full article

The Supreme Court's decision in Collins v. Yellen has garnered a fair amount of attention because it resulted in a change in the leadership at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and largely dashed the hopes of Fannie and Freddie preferred ... Read full article

The Supreme Court ruled today in Collins v. Yellen , a case brought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred shareholders that challenged both the constitutionality of the FHFA Director's appointment and the 2012 amendment to Treasury's stock ... Read full article

I have a new white paper out from the Roosevelt Institute's Great Democracy Initiative. The paper, which is co-authored with Lindsay Owens and Ganesh Sitaraman , proposes a standing emergency economic stabilization authority to provide an ... Read full article

Frank Partnoy has an important and unsettling piece in The   Atlantic about how CLOs (securitized syndicated loans, in short) might be at the core of the next bank meltdown, which he sees coming as soon as later this year. Because 2020 was starting to get ... Read full article

My new book,  The Great American Housing Bubble:  What Went Wrong and How We Can Protect Ourselves in the Future  is being released on Tuesday by Harvard University Press. The book is co-authored with my long-time collaborator, Wharton real estate ... Read full article

The McConnell Bailout Bill (a/k/a HR 748 or the CARES Act), weighs in at just shy of 600 pages. I've taken the liberty of summarizing it in a powerpoint deck for teaching (syllabus be damned) and thought it might be helpful to make generally ... Read full article

We need to bail out the economy, and it's not going to be cheap. The government is going to have to carry the economy for 18-24 months. There's no way of avoiding that. But we don't need to be stupid or corrupt about the way we do it. And ... Read full article

While Congress struggles to figure out the best way to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, it is very apparent that immediate relief measures are necessary, if only to buy time for a more comprehensive approach. Layoffs are already happening and with ... Read full article

Senator Elizabeth Warren has put out a plan for mitigating the economic fallout from the coronavirus. ... Read full article

The practice of mindfulness and other types of meditation are growing on the coasts and within the law school and lawyer communities. Perhaps these practices can provide meaningful benefits to bankruptcy clients, bankruptcy lawyers and bankruptcy ... Read full article

Facebook’s proposed Libra cryptocurrency project has truly stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy.  Critics have generally focused on Libra as a  currency  and the power of Facebook in society and its appropriation of users’ privacy.   ... Read full article

Before it was the global financial crisis, we called it the subprime crisis. The slow, painful recovery, and the ever-widening income and wealth inequality, are the results of policy choices made before and after the crisis. Before 2007, legislators and ... Read full article

There's a big story in the NY Times about how the financial structures being used to finance many corporate loans —so-called Collateralized Loan Obligations or CLOs—look very similar to those used to finance mortgages during the housing bubble.  ... Read full article

Frustrated that Congress did not decide to collapse the CFTC and SEC as part of Dodd-Frank, and facing the reality that the SEC is still working on its rules under Title VII of Dodd-Frank, ISDA, the swaps industry trade group, is out with a white paper ... Read full article

Or EGRRCPA, for short. That is the official name of S. 2155 , a bill which seems to be tearing Senate Democrats apart . ... Read full article