Posts Tagged ‘Securities and Exchange Commission’

Banking and finance roundup

Keeping an overdue appointment with the Appointments Clause

Caleb Brown interviews Trevor Burrus and me for the Cato Daily Podcast on Lucia v. SEC, Thursday’s Supreme Court case on the Appointments Clause and administrative law. Crossing to join with the conservatives, Justice Elena Kagan wrote a narrowly tailored opinion invalidating the method by which the Securities and Exchange Commission had appointed its five administrative law judges at the time of the dispute (it has since fixed its appointment method). The majority opinion carefully sidesteps the issue of how ALJs may properly be removed; Justice Breyer, who largely concurred with the result on separate grounds, explored some of those issues in his opinion. See also Ilya Shapiro on June 21 as “government structure day” at the Supreme Court, and with more on the merits. Related: Federalist Society forum on Michael Rappaport proposal for replacement of ALJs with Article III judges.

Banking and finance roundup

  • High cross-border remittance costs for globally mobile workers slow ascent from poverty, and know-your-customer and money-laundering regulations have made things worse [Money and Banking]
  • “The Supreme Court should find ALJs to be ‘officers of the United States’ and thus make them subject to presidential appointment and removal.” [Ilya Shapiro on Cato merits amicus filing in Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission]
  • “Settlement of Lawyer-Driven ‘Merger Tax’ Litigation Stumbles in New York” [Greg Herbers, WLF]
  • “Financial Regulation: The Apotheosis of the Administrative State?” 2017 National Lawyers Convention Federalist Society panel with Richard Epstein, Hal Scott, Peter Wallison, and Arthur Wilmarth, moderated by Judge Carlos Bea;
  • With advances in Oregon and even California, deregulation of commercial insurance lines is having a moment [Ray Lehmann, Insurance Journal; Lehmann’s 2017 Insurance Regulation Report Card for R Street Institute] Perennially troubled Massachusetts, on the other hand, continues slide in same survey [Agency Checklists]
  • Tech companies have been experimenting with old and lawful device of dual class stock and SEC shouldn’t be allowed to use raised eyebrow power to stop that [Bainbridge, WLF]

Banking and finance roundup

  • D.C. Circuit’s en banc decision upholding constitutionality of CFPB disappointing but not surprising. On to SCOTUS [Ilya Shapiro, Aaron Nielson, Jonathan Adler]
  • Big thinking under way at the SEC could replace securities class action sector with free contract: “The SEC should authorize mandatory arbitration of shareholder class action lawsuits” [Bainbridge, Benjamin Bain/Bloomberg News (noting that broker dealers have long been free to use arbitration clauses)]
  • Milberg Weiss founder Melvyn Weiss dies at 82 [ABA Journal, our coverage over the years of Weiss and his firm, @PaulHorwitz (“Give generously, and to the right people, so that your NYT obit can be a glowing apologia despite a few inconvenient facts.”)]
  • Here come the shareholder derivative suits over sleazy-boss #MeToo scandals [Kevin LaCroix] “NERA: 2017 Securities Suits Filed at ‘Record Pace'” [same]
  • Rogoff rebuttals: “More Evidence of the High Collateral Damage of a War on Cash” [Lawrence White, Cato, earlier] “Money as coined liberty” [David R. Henderson]
  • Quotas/targets for percentages of women, disabled and indigenous persons on Canadian corporate boards? [Terence Corcoran/Financial Post, more]

Banking and finance roundup

Banking and finance roundup

  • New research suggests “SEC rule intended to prevent conflicts of interest among staff has actually had the perverse effect of causing staff to profit from their knowledge as insiders of the SEC” [Thaya Brook Knight, Cato]
  • “Federal Prohibition Left California Cannabis Farmers Without Insurance or Banks When Wildfires Struck” [Christian Britschgi]
  • “Is Dodd-Frank/SOX reform dead?” [Stephen Bainbridge]
  • Trial lawyers and CFPB did little to correct Wells Fargo fake-account scandal [Ted Frank WSJ letter]
  • Study finds that more-cumbersome judicial foreclosure methods tend to correlate with tougher lending standards especially for poor; should constriction of home credit for poorer households be interpreted as a good? [Brian Feinstein, Chicago via CL&P]
  • A different way to encourage more prudent home lending practice, scale back FDIC coverage [Scott Sumner]

Time to revisit the Chevron stretch

A case called Digital Realty Trust v. Somers gives the Supreme Court a chance to rein in a particularly inappropriate use of the Chevron doctrine, under which courts give deference to agencies’ interpretations of law [Ilya Shapiro, Harvard Law Review blog]

The last few years have of course seen renewed attention — academic, judicial, and journalistic — to the question of whether courts have become altogether too deferential to executive agencies. While Chevron deference (and its cousins, Auer and Seminole Rock deference) was originally justified as a necessary tool for preventing courts from unduly meddling in administrative decisionmaking, hasn’t the pendulum swung too far?…

As the Supreme Court explained in Long Island Care at Home, Ltd. v. Coke in 2007, the APA [Administrative Procedure Act] requires an agency conducting notice-and-comment rulemaking to provide the public with “fair notice” of what will be, or might be, included in its final regulation. Yet there was nothing in the [Securities and Exchange Commission’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] that would have given any notice to the public that it was going to change whom Dodd-Frank would protect from retaliation.

Just last year, the Court reaffirmed in Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro that procedurally deficient rules that violate the APA do not receive Chevron deference because they lack the “force of law.” The SEC regulation here was procedurally deficient because of the final rule’s fair-notice problem, so it shouldn’t qualify for Chevron.

More on the Somers case and Cato’s amicus brief: Trevor Burrus and Frank Garrison.

Banking and finance roundup

  • “The Rise of Financial Regulation by Settlement” [Matthew C. Turk, Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog]
  • Before buying into the idea that fractional reserve banking has some sort of fraudulent roots, consider the common law concepts of detinue, bailment, and debt [George Selgin, Cato]
  • Cato files brief urging Supreme Court to clarify constitutional status of SEC’s use of in-house administrative law judges [Thaya Brook Knight on Lucia v. SEC]
  • Between FATCA and the Patriot Act, American extraterritorial banking rules keep wreaking havoc on other countries [Ernesto Londoño, New York Times on Uruguay legal marijuana businesses]
  • “Congress Can Rescind the CFPB’s Gift to Trial Lawyers” [Ted Frank, WSJ]
  • “Absent Reform, Little Relief in Sight from Chronic “Merger Tax” Class-Action Litigation” [Anthony Rickey, WLF]

Banking and finance roundup