Yearly Archives: 2012

An Unexpected Remedy: Eminent Domain as a Potential Solution to the Mortgage Crisis

Dec 12, 2012 Saule T. Omarova2 comments

It is quite rare to come across a law review article that offers not only a theoretical diagnosis of a major socio-economic problem but also a plan for solving that problem in practice.  Putting forward a real, well-reasoned, and detailed policy proposal is always an act of scholarly courage, which inevitably exposes the author to all kinds of criticism.  This is especially true where the proposal targets a complex issue in which stakes are high, arguments are heavily ideology-driven, and powerful special interests dominate the agenda. Robert Hockett’s recent essay takes on precisely such a controversial issue: the nation’s continuing problem with underwater mortgages.  Since it was posted on SSRN several months ago, this essay has been making serious waves in policy-making circles (and earning its author no love from Wall Street).

Hockett starts with an incisive diagnosis of the root causes and structural dynamics of the mortgage crisis plaguing the nation since 2007. Five years after the bursting of the latest real estate bubble, mortgage debt overhang continues to be one of the primary factors impeding broad economic recovery in the U.S. and, consequently, globally. As Hockett argues, underwater mortgages – or loans on which the homeowner owes more than the current market value of the house – function as the principal drag on the U.S. housing market and the entire economy. Homeowners whose mortgages are underwater default at accelerating rates, leading to mass foreclosure, property degradation, and consequent asset devaluation. Moreover, such homeowners also don’t spend their money on purchases of goods, which depresses the consumer demand that is so vital to a robust economic recovery. According to Hockett, as of the beginning of this year, nearly a quarter of all mortgages in the U.S. were underwater, with an even higher concentration of underwater loans in certain especially hard-hit counties and cities. In effect, these are the loans that, while not technically in default, teeter on the edge of the abyss – and the more of them fall, the wider that abyss gets. Hockett argues that the only practical long-term solution to this problem is to write down the principal on underwater mortgages to post-bust market value levels.  That would effectively force the necessary adjustment in asset values and erase the crippling legacy of the pre-2007 real estate bubble.

Yet, so far, nothing has been done to implement this solution. Focusing primarily on private-label mortgage securitizations, Hockett identifies key structural obstacles to principal write-downs of underwater mortgage loans.  Thus, multiple investors in mortgage-backed securities suffer from a classic set of collective action problems and require collective agents – trustees or loan servicers – to act on their behalf. Unfortunately, the typical pooling and servicing agreements (PSAs), drafted during the irrationally exuberant bubble years, prohibit or effectively prevent modifications of mortgage loans, even where such modifications would bring down the loan-to-value ratio and potentially increase the market value of such loans.  The essay contains a thorough and lucid description of numerous built-in market dysfunctions and conflicts of interest among various market actors.  It is a logical conclusion, then, that the government is the only potential collective agent capable of overcoming such conflicts and contractual impediments.  Indeed, the core of Hockett’s argument is that the government has to use its constitutional powers of eminent domain to force write-downs of underwater mortgages.

Skeptical of the federal government’s political will to act to that end, however, Hockett proposes that state and local governments take the lead in this area.  He calls for states and municipalities – townships, cities, and counties – to exercise their eminent domain authority to take over underwater mortgage loans, compensate bondholders for the fair value of such loans, and then modify the loans by writing down the principal.  Not surprisingly, this is where the proposal makes many readers at least somewhat uneasy, if not outright hostile to the entire thing. Yet, they should stay with Professor Hockett as he patiently and eloquently takes them through the intricate details of his plan and explains how it complies with all constitutional limitations on exercise of a sovereign’s eminent domain authority. He dispels common confusions and misunderstandings of the relevant law and builds a convincing case for eminent domain as a “win-win” solution that would ultimately benefit everyone: homeowners, holders of mortgage-backed bonds, communities, and local and regional economies.

Of course, it is impossible to do justice to such a complex proposal in a few short paragraphs. It is also difficult to predict whether this creative and elegant plan will, in fact, become the blueprint for widespread local and state government action. Yet, the increasingly heated debate on the merits of Professor Hockett’s ideas and the apparent mobilization of various interests opposing (or, conversely, supporting) his plan suggest that it may well become such a blueprint. In any event, this essay is a must-read for anyone interested in financial markets and regulation.

Costing Financial Regulation

Nov 13, 2012 Caroline Bradley

Debates about the costs and benefits of regulation, and about particular rules, are a very visible feature of lobbying about proposed financial regulation and of challenges to final rules. Industry opposition to the Dodd-Frank Act has focused on arguments about the costs of regulations envisaged by the Act. For example, in the summer of 2012 the US Chamber of Commerce Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness published a report by Anjan Thakor on the Economic Consequences of the Volcker Rule which argued that the rule would adversely affect bank customers as well as banks. The report argued that reductions in the risk of banking and of costs to taxpayers could be achieved “with greater efficiency by making judicious use of capital and liquidity requirements.” Senator Richard Shelby introduced the Financial Regulatory Responsibility Act of 2011 (FRRA) in Congress with a promise that it would hold “financial regulators accountable for rigorous, consistent economic analysis on every new rule they propose.” Bruce Kraus and Connor Raso are concerned that the SEC’s ability to regulate, and even to carry out its mandates under Dodd-Frank, will be severely compromised by these developments.

In this paper Kraus and Raso argue that, by failing to provide its own interpretation of the National Securities Markets Improvement Act’s requirement that the SEC consider the impact of its rules on “efficiency, competition and capital formation,” the SEC allowed commentators and the courts to define the agency’s obligations with respect to cost-benefit analysis. The authors critique court decisions which have addressed the SEC’s obligations to consider the impact of its rules on “efficiency, competition and capital formation,”(in particular Business Roundtable v SEC), and argue that the SEC should now “affirm its substantial and long-standing expertise in financial economics, and insist on the agency’s right, derived from that expertise, to discern and define the boundary between economic analysis and policy choice.” Kraus and Raso discuss the SEC’s composition as a multi-member, bi-partisan agency which must, as a result, engage in compromise, even log-rolling, although its ability to do so is compromised by the Sunshine Act. The structure of the SEC is thus important in thinking about how the SEC should act, and the authors argue that the requirement that the SEC engage in cost-benefit analysis should not be interpreted to “invalidate the predictable results of such a system.” Kraus and Raso approve of the SEC’s March 2012 issuance of Guidance on Economic Analysis in SEC Rulemakings, but they urge the SEC to think of “involving economists more completely in the policymaking process” as more than “a procedural change.” They argue that “the economic analysis will be more compelling if it influences (rather than merely describes and rationalizes) the substance of the rule.”

As Kraus and Raso recognize, the SEC’s composition has led to Commissioners making public statements on the adoption of final rules, often invoking arguments about inadequate cost-benefit analysis. For example, In August 2012 when the SEC adopted final rules on disclosures with respect to conflict minerals and on disclosures of payments resource extraction issuers make to governments (both mandated by Dodd-Frank), Commissioner Daniel Gallagher stated:

I am not able to support this rule today, because the analysis is incomplete. The costs this rule will impose are clear enough. Its intended benefits, by contrast, are socio-political and aspirational in nature, worthy but indeterminate — although they are presumed to justify all costs. And certain key discretionary choices made by the Commission’s rule will have the effect of increasing the rule’s burdens….we have no reason to think the SEC will succeed in achieving complex social and foreign policy objectives as to which the policymaking entities that do have relevant expertise have, to date, largely failed.

This statement (invoking as it does the FRRA emphasis on quantified costs and benefits) does suggest a larger issue, that the regulatory process is being used to second-guess and undermine Congressional mandates. Kraus and Raso point out that the proxy access rule invalidated in the Business Roundtable decision “had been expressly and contemporaneously authorized by Congress.” They ask whether the real explanation for the Business Roundtable decision is that the Court of Appeals did not think that the courts’ deference to agency expertise in scientific areas such as toxicology should extend to expertise in financial economics. If this is so, then the SEC’s implementation of the authors’ recommendation that it insist on its expertise in financial economics will be unavailing. At the same time, the more seriously the SEC addresses cost-benefit analysis as a component of rule-making, the more problematic the courts’ rejections of SEC rule-making will become.

Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Write Contracts

Sep 17, 2012 Anna Gelpern

Every so often, an odd take on an obscure thing resonates in a big way. My first clue came when a colleague who writes about cyberlaw blasted around a paper about a silly old clause in government bonds to the entire business law listserv. Then plaintiffs, defendants, and amici on all sides cited to the same paper in briefs to the Second Circuit. Then a big-time finance journalist talked it up over dim sum. Then a bankruptcy friend said that I should review it on Jotwell. To be sure, I knew and liked the piece (and the authors¹)  but what was in it for the general audience? It is about a clause with a Latin name and unknown meaning, collecting dust in contracts too-exotic for textbooks. The authors’ major finding is that fancy corporate lawyers who draft the clause like to describe themselves as bits of debris bobbing on the waves of history … even as they paddle while no one is looking. And yet, in their seemingly discrete tale about a technicality, Mark Weidemaier and colleagues strike some important chords.

Weidemaier, Scott, and Gulati write about the pari passu clause in sovereign debt contracts. The clause usually says, with minor permutations, that the debt is and will rank pari passu (in equal step) with others like it. For all anyone knew, pari passu lived a quiet life in bond boilerplate until an enterprising creditor used it ambush a Brussels magistrate, get an injunction, and collect money from an immune government.²  This caused a kerfuffle in both law and policy circles for upsetting the delicate balance between debt collection and sovereign immunity. To the policy people’s credit, they fixed the narrow problem right away with a statute barring similar injunctions in Belgium. But the contract clause remained and even grew in stature, all the while eminent lawyers in New York and London heaped scorn on pari passu and the Brussels court.

The authors do not revisit the literature on the meaning of pari passu, which has convinced me that its contemporary meaning is indeterminate or trivial. Instead, they interview hundreds of lawyers and read hundreds of contracts to figure out why no one has bothered to fix the term, even as nearly everyone professed to be upset about it. Instead of a reason, they get stories of the mythical origins of pari passu, each with some basis in truth, but none that holds up against the facts. The unifying moral of the lawyers’ stories is that pari passu’s birth—be it in early 20^th century invasions, or late 20^th century banking crises—irrevocably tainted its life, and emasculated its would-be saviors at New York and London law firms. Worse, when Weidemaier and colleagues uncover a pretty convincing version of the truth, the story-tellers do not want to know.

So why should the rest of us care about pari passu or tales of law firm impotence?

• First, the article comes out at a time when pari passu is again important on the merits. The same creditors that befuddled Belgian courts in 2000 revived the argument in New York, and have now taken it to the Second Circuit. Depending on what the judges say about the meaning of the term, long-uncollectable government debt could become collectable, potentially altering the ways in which governments manage crises. The article puts a damper on both sides’ strong readings of the clause, and (to me) screams out against hanging big policy decisions on language that no drafter can explain or wants to own. Of course if the courts want to make it up, they can and they will.
• Second, the study offers a provocative take on business contracting. It uses insights from economics, sociology, history and political science to document a rational quest for “completion” that is mired in egos, politics, culture, and institutional frictions. Transaction cost engineers marry Mad Men. But what is to be done? Are the clients ill-served? Should they demand and pay for more original, and more accessible contracts? Is the litigation risk unavoidable (at least at a reasonable cost)? Should courts penalize drafters for writing contracts that are both meaningless and useful (no mean feat, by the way)? On all these questions, the article is mum—more existential sociology than pragmatic law review.
• Third, the article is methodologically lovely: a mix of archival research, original data mining and number crunching, and in-person interviews. It feels serious but also accessible and unpretentious, melding Weidemaier’s earlier forays into sovereign debt (here and here) and the latest from Scott and Gulati (here). Its theoretical and methodological catholicism makes the piece intuitively credible, and serves as a nice reminder of the empirical potential in law scholarship.

In the end, we are left wondering about the lawyers— craving center stage but stuck in the shadows, with their slightly sad efforts to massage their place in history, smarter than they let on, not smart enough to outwit fate, doomed in the end to lose control over the precious words that were never theirs to begin with. They were sent for. We know how the play ends, but we keep watching. And the quest for pari passu continues.

Going Public before the IPO

Jul 26, 2012 D. Gordon Smith1 comment

For some employees and investors, Facebook did not make the decision to pursue an initial public offering (IPO) fast enough. So when a former employee of Facebook needed to sell some shares in the company, he approached SecondMarket, which describes itself as “the leading marketplace for alternative investments.” In 2009 Facebook shares began trading on SecondMarket and SharesPost, another leading market for shares in companies that are moving toward an IPO. These new markets – called private secondary markets – are the hottest new development in securities trading.

Although we have much to learn about private secondary markets, the first article out of the gates is well worth reading. In The New Exit in Venture Capital, Darian Ibrahim relies on interviews, trade publications, blog posts, and newspaper stories to study these emerging markets. He focuses most of his attention on the so-called “direct market,” which involves the trading of stock in startup companies, as opposed to the trading of interests in investment funds. Ibrahim aims to contribute to the still vibrant literature on venture capital investing, but his description of direct private secondary markets should have a much broader audience.

Traditionally, the venture capital cycle begins with the creation of an investment fund that venture capitalists use to invest in portfolio companies. Venture capitalists typically invest in stages, building a portfolio company from startup to the point where the company can be sold, either through an acquisition by a larger company or through an IPO. Upon the sale of the company or shortly thereafter, venture capitalists extract their investments and any return on those investments, and they distribute much of that money to their fund investors. The cycle then begins afresh with a new fund.

With the decline in IPO activity over the past decade, Ibrahim argues that venture capitalists face a liquidity gap, which could impair the formation of funds at the start of the venture capital cycle. Playing off the debate relating to “capital lock-in,” Ibrahim argues that the dearth of good exit options for venture capitalists creates a form of “investor lock-in,” usually associated with traditional close corporations: “minority shareholders cannot look to the corporation for redemption, and there is no ready market for selling shares to third parties.” (P. 7). Unlike capital lock-in, which may have some beneficial features, Ibrahim argues that investor lock-in is almost all bad for venture capitalists and their portfolio companies, raising the cost of capital and creating governance problems.

Private secondary markets promise some relief from investor lock-in. While most sellers in these markets are entrepreneurs and startup employees, Ibrahim found that venture capitalists were becoming increasingly active as sellers in private secondary markets. The buyers include various investment funds, strategic buyers (other companies looking to gain a foothold toward acquisition), and even some late-stage venture capitalists.

According to Ibrahim, buyers are motivated by a desire to own hot new companies whose shares would otherwise be inaccessible. Also, the companies whose shares trade in direct private secondary markets are “well-known, later-stage companies.” So, investors find the evaluation of these companies easier than the evaluation of early-stage startups. Buyers may also be motivated by the prospect of relatively quick exits: “As long as traditional exits for winning companies are simply delayed, rather than gone altogether, direct market buyers will reap their spoils.” (P. 20).

This last point raises a troublesome question for Ibrahim’s thesis: do these markets work without IPOs? Ibrahim cited three companies as examples of the companies whose shares are sold in direct private secondary markets: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tesla Motors. All three of these companies subsequently executed IPOs. Indeed, SharesPost claims to be “changing the way companies, investors and shareholders … transact in the pre-IPO economy.”

Thus, it appears that direct private secondary markets observe a fundamental law of investing which I discussed in my paper, The Exit Structure of Venture Capital: “Before [people] invest, they plan for exit.” If direct private secondary markets are designed to fill the liquidity gap created by the dearth of IPOs, as Ibrahim suggests, it is not clear that these new markets will be up to the task. Ultimately, it seems, we need a vibrant market for IPOs if the venture capital cycle is to operate effectively.

The future of direct private secondary markets is uncertain, but Congress attempted to encourage the development of those markets with the recent passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. Among other things, the JOBS Act facilitates “crowdfunding” by allowing early-stage companies to raise up to $1 million through small investments from non-accredited investors. The JOBS Act also broadens the appeal of offerings under Regulation D, which may not only encourage more primary offerings, but also more secondary sales.

Private secondary markets have become an important new component in the system for financing innovative companies. Ibrahim’s paper is an excellent introduction to these new markets, and an important contribution to the field of law and entrepreneurship. Brian Broughman organized an excellent panel of papers on private secondary markets at the recent Annual Meeting of the Law & Society Association, and interested readers should look to those papers for the latest new developments in this literature.

A Radical Perspective on the Mundane

Jun 7, 2012 Cristie Ford

What if it turned out that much of the crucial work that law does in the world operates in a register that is not captured by most legal scholarship? What makes legal reasoning and legal technique so resilient and so abidingly “legitimate,” even while other forms of expert knowledge, like those underpinning government fiscal policy, quantitative risk modeling, and the rational actor model unravel (as they did in the midst of the recent financial crisis)? How much of the work of building and maintaining global governance is accomplished under the radar, by the routinized practices of law – and to what extent can grand political ambition leverage these underappreciated tools in the service of its own ends? These are the challenging questions that Annelise Riles poses in this rich and elegantly-written book. For those not familiar with her argument, it merits serious attention.

The focus of Riles’s book is contracts for collateral. Riles spent years conducting field work and follow-up studies in the Japanese derivatives markets, tracking daily back office routines underlying collateral contracts. Riles argues that the legal construction of collateral is interesting for two reasons. The first is the curious fact that at the height of the recent financial crisis, when the great conceptual edifices of international finance shook, collateral – the very notion of it, its enforceability and its legitimacy – was never seriously questioned. In her words, “collateral seems to have survived the tectonic shifts in market ideologies of the last few years with its reputation intact when so much else of what once was unquestionable dogma – free markets, self-regulation, the innate brilliance and rationality of derivatives traders – now seems like a quaint mythology from a strange other world” (page 1). The book is partly devoted to trying to understand just what it is about collateral contracts that makes them so robust. She suggests, provocatively, that the wonder is not that the financial system broke down in fall 2008; the wonder is that it ever operated at all, across time zones, across differing institutional processes and national contexts, across technical glitches, and across the logistical complexities of global markets. The book is full of surprising and counterintuitive examples of the important role that legal technique plays in that system.

The second reason that collateral is interesting, as Riles demonstrates, is that collateral is precisely collateral in our thinking about law, much in the way that law itself is collateral to the sweeping political ideas that transfix us: neoliberalism, globalization, the efficient market hypothesis, global financial regulation. Collateral, and law (and the lawyers whose job it is to “paper the deals”), are sideshows, the necessary but dull operational handmaidens to the dazzling main event. Riles’s point is that in fact, the mundane technical processes surrounding collateral are sustaining, stabilizing, and even constitutive of broader governance systems to a degree that we have not appreciated. Riles says that one of the book’s goals is “to show theorists and practitioners in the law that this given and commonsense dimension of their life work is in fact doing far more work than they could possibly imagine, and that legal expertise is an ensemble of far more nuanced and fine-grained pattern of theories and practices than they acknowledge to themselves” (page 13).

As an anthropologist, Riles treats legal instruments, practices, knowledge, and techniques  – the actual filling out of forms based on the ISDA Master Agreement, the deployment of legal fictions, the particular practical problem-solving orientation underlying legal reasoning – as artifacts, and as profoundly important ones. Her account is likely to resonate with many who have experienced the way that corporate lawyers, working on a deal agreed upon by others, function almost like high priests of an elaborate follow-on legal ritual based on esoteric knowledge and arcane documents. Riles claims that legal technique matters not only in the way it might in a Deals class, or in a real deal. It also matters at the meta-level, where we think about how we might restructure a financial system to make it more robust. She speaks eloquently about the “agency” of tools, and suggests that “in the ‘meantime’ [while we are preoccupied with higher order theories and political objectives], the means often occlude the ends and overtake the instrument’s user” (page 229). Moreover, the tools Riles catalogues are specifically legal tools. For example, she describes the almost miraculous time-travelling effect that the legal fiction underlying “netting” (i.e., agreeing in advance that, at some future potential point of insolvency, collateral contracts shall be deemed prior to that point to have been netted in a particular order) has on collateral holders’ positions.

Collateral Knowledge builds a ground-up account of the profound importance of mundane legal technique, but it builds that account all the way up through the higher reaches of legal philosophy. Riles engages with Hayek, drawing on examples from risk management in the OTC derivatives markets. She rejects the Hayekian notion that public sector action is destined always to fall behind private sector action, while acknowledging the perceived “legitimacy gap” that nevertheless exists.

In a fascinating turn, she examines how the “audacious legal trick” of the legal fictions underlying collateral – which are conventionally used by private sector actors, but which are neither inherently private nor inherently public – manage to trail so much legitimacy behind them. Riles challenges the Realist notion that formal documents do not matter, and the post-Realist notion that law should be made to conform to real world conditions, on the grounds that law’s generative power derives from its own attenuated relationship to reality and its use of legal forms and legal fictions. Riles also confronts sociolegal scholarship. She challenges the distinction between law-on-the-books and law-in-action, and identifies the field’s failure to study legal discourse as a cultural phenomenon in its own right rather than just as a function of social, political, and economic forces. On each front, the book’s insistent, ethnographically-informed focus on the intricacies and function of technocratic legal knowledge practices makes a fresh and hugely important contribution.

If Riles is right, what might this mean for legal scholarship? Riles suggests that it is time to stop thinking solely in terms of grand regulatory architectures and new institutional designs, and time to examine the potential inherent in legal technique. Legal scholarship has only the most rudimentary framework for speaking about artifacts like legal forms, fictions, and routinized practices as if they were conceptually interesting or institutionally significant. Collateral Knowledge marks an important step in helping to democratize access to and appreciation of legal technique, in the service of producing more effective forms of regulation.