“Everyone loves money. That is why they call it MONEY.” – David Mamet. The trillion-dollar coin is a proposal to avoid the debt ceiling through a loophole in a federal statute that authorizes the U.S. Mint to coin platinum in any denomination. Platinum is reserved for commemorative issues, and the obscure statutory provision was certainly […]
Archive | Finance
Adam Levitin on the New Massachusetts Court Foreclosure Decision
By Kenneth Anderson on January 12, 2011 1:48 pm in Economy, Finance, Financial Crisis, Property Rights
(Update. Megan McArdle has a number of interesting comments and posts on foreclosure, modification, the effect of securitization, and the processes for recording title and other things. This blog post has very interesting comments as well.) Adam Levitin writes at the ForeclosureBlues blog about the Ibanez decision in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (pdf […]
David Skeel’s Excellent Book, and Comparing Discretion in the Financial Crisis and National Security
(Note: I was writing this on the plane without quite being able to see the computer screen, so I’ve gone back and corrected some grammar and spelling, and tried to make a couple of things clearer. I’ll post separately as well on the topic of national security and the financial crisis, and the role of […]
Law and Regulation of Central Banking?
I am curious as to whether any law school offers a (seminar?) course on the law and regulation of central banking, either specifically on the Fed in US domestic law or else something like “comparative central banking” in the transnational law curriculum. I’d be interested in responses as to courses, syllabi, reading, and course topics. […]
The Conglomerate Book Club on ‘All the Devils Are Here’
Over at the business law professor blog, The Conglomerate, the book club has been reading Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s book on the run-up to the financial crisis, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. David Zaring introduces the book, his brief take, and the book club discussion here – then […]
Derivatives Clearing Houses
Although I have a few reservations about the tone of the article being just slightly conspiratorial, Louise Story’s front page NYT story today on the evolution of derivatives clearinghouses is highly informative and very well done. The graphics showing how the bilateral trades would turn into centralized clearing are quite good and would be useful […]
Good Explanations of the Eurozone Crisis
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times each have good, comprehensible explanations of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis on the front pages today. (The Journal has a particularly useful graphic that breaks out each country.)
My One Paragraph Assessment of Dodd-Frank
While I wait for David Skeel and William Cowan’s new book on the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill to appear next month (The New Financial Deal), I have tried to make my own assessment of what the bill means in the aggregate. In order to do this, I have read the bill in its entirety twice. The […]
David Skeel on Bankruptcy for States
UPenn law professor and corporate finance and bankruptcy specialist David Skeel has an important article in this week’s Weekly Standard talking about the possibility and utility of bankruptcy for states. The article argues first that a new chapter for states in the Federal bankruptcy statute would be constitutional, and then turns to argue, second, that […]
Microfinance as Subprime
Having done a fair amount of work in microfinance and closely related areas (development finance involving business clients with larger-than-microfinance loans) in the developing world, I am overall a big fan. As many people are. The question that has long loomed, however, is whether it can or should scale upwards to become a full-fledged part […]
GM Benefits from Tax Law Ruling
In the terrific conference on the Constitution in the Financial Crisis that Co-Conspirator Todd and I were privileged to attend last week at Stanford Law School, one of the panelists (this was a panel looking at the peculiar incentives and disincentives created for corporate governance by having government as a controlling shareholder, as in GM) […]
The NYT’s Room for Debate Blog on Investing/Lending to Finance Lawsuits
The often very interesting Room for Debate blog at the New York Times has a new discussion on the question of whether it is good policy to allow outsiders to invest in someone else’s lawsuit. Here’s the opening to how the question is framed: With litigation costs rising, many plaintiffs and their lawyers do not […]
Divorce Insurance
The New York Times Bucks Blog (of August 6, 2010) has a fascinating article by Jennifer Saranow Schultz on the first-ever offering in the United States of divorce insurance, the WedLock policy issued by a start up insurance company in North Carolina, Safeguard Guaranty Corp. Markets in everything, etc. The casualty insurance is designed to […]
Incompatible Trilemma Arguments
I have always appreciated the structure of the classic “problem of evil” argument – appreciated it on aesthetic and elegance grounds. You perhaps recall the general formulation: all powerful, all knowing, and all good. Any two are compatible with the existence of evil; not all three. There are many forms of argument roughly set up […]
Death Incentives
Mean Professor Anderson made his first year law and economics class memorize Greg Mankiw’s ten basic principles of economics, including … incentives matter. Also, people make decisions at the margin. One of the interesting questions – more than interesting, genuinely crucial to how one understands and interacts with other people – is when those heuristics […]