April 30, 2008
Not sure if it's because of a dearth of commissioners, because there's apparently a global financial crisis going on, or because of those Sudan divestment safe harbor regs, but the SEC, by its own account, is taking twice as long to rule on appeals from ALJ and SRO adjudications than it did a year ago. Check out these charts (and, as Gordon and I were just lamenting to one another, if it was a bit easier to take pdf pix and put them in Typepad, we'd reproduce them on this page all nice and pretty for you). Anyway, the median age of pending appeals from ALJs is 419 days, up from 210 in the prior semi-year, while the median age of pending appeals from SROs is 325 up from 284. All this while the number of pending appeals has increased only slightly or stayed flat.
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April 29, 2008
Josh Wright weighs in interestingly here. Meanwhile, Ngan Dinh collects advice for young economists here (HT: ND). I find the tenor of the advice to be pretty different than the sort usually given to non-interdisciplinary law professors - and that's pretty interesting too.
April 28, 2008
The editors of the Bluebook are at it again! In anticipation of leaving their mark on the citation world in the next edition, the editors are asking for input. Here is a survey you can fill out. Ten participants will be chosen at random to receive a free copy of the Nineteenth Edition! Email suggestions may also be sent to suggestions@legalbluebook.com.
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After the SEC went after a short seller for spreading false rumors - unprecedented, apparently - it's worth looking to see if economists, the lonely defenders of the shorts, are still on board. Maybe not, at least not in every case, such as if damage to the stock price might deter the firm from useful, announced plans. Here's a blog post, here's a story, and here's the paper, written in part by, I must note, a colleague of mine.
It sounds like the plot of a Hannah Montana episode:
Hannah Montana/Miley Stewart is super-excited when she finds out that she's going to be photographed by one of the most famous celebrity photographers around, known for her artsy magazine photos that reveal her subjects' inner characters. However, her excitement turns to embarassment when the published pictures turn out to be well, less artsy than revealing.
Unfortunately, this is real life. Vanity Fair magazine is about to hit the stands with a photo shoot of Miley Cyrus by Annie Leibowitz that features the 15-year-old clothed only in a satin bedsheet, with rumpled hair and much skin revealed. (NYT story here.) The Miley Cyrus camp is now claiming that MIley is surprised by how revealing the pictures are and that she thought the pictures would be "artsy." Leibowitz is saying that Miley's "parents/minders" were there all day and saw the digital pictures as they were being shot. (Vanity Fair has even posted a video of the shoot to back up this claim, although the video pictures both Miley and her dad in different outfits outside.) The pictures throw Miley in even a more embarassing light as a quote from Miley is printed across them -- a quote in which she states that Britney and Lindsey have good hearts and are "struggling."
Of course, in the TV show, Miley's dad, Robby Stewart, played by her real-life dad, Billy Ray Cyrus, would have stopped the shoot the second someone said, "OK, now Miley we want you to take all your clothes off and just wrap yourself in this sheet." We have to wonder why none of her parents/minders jumped in during real life. It's obvious why a photographer known for controversial celebrity photographs would want to get pictures of a 15-year-old squeaky clean Disney actress with bedhead in a bedsheet, but the parents that allow it seem to have to carry the heavy blame here.
At least I never stood in line for Hannah Montana tickets. . . .Gordon?
April 24, 2008
Ethiopis Tafara, the SEC's international chief, testified today that:
the SEC has in place several rules that require disclosure of certain sovereign wealth fund activities and sovereign business activities that could raise many of the concerns we hear in our own and other markets. None of these disclosure requirements was designed with sovereign wealth funds or sovereign businesses in mind, but they are nonetheless of value in this context to the extent that many of the concerns that sovereign investing raises are similar to concerns about other types of investment.
Are SWFs so different from other big funds? CFIUS might think so, but anyone, at home or abroad, might choose to act in a non-profit maximizing way for a little while (to help the party you support, for example, or the country whose favor you are trying to gain). And in the long run, everyone who does so should be subject to market discipline. So a lot turns on the idea that the sovereigns may prevent their own regulators from cooperating with the SEC on investigations. I wonder if that is an important enough problem to require legislation.
On the other hand, providing SWFs with tax advantages ... that's a bit more mysterious.
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April 23, 2008
Coming out just in time for Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting: the second edition of The Essays of Warren Buffett, by, well, Warren Buffett, and edited by Conglomerate guest Lawrence Cunningham. The first edition may belong in the canon of business literature. (Not entirely related news about it here, and some reviews of the first edition here.) The second edition contains Buffett's views on CEO pay, how General Re handled complex derivative instruments (and remember, Buffett only buys companies with businesses he can understand), and Berkshire Hathaway succession, which I've been wondering about. You know what to do.
AG Michael Mukasey suggested today that organized crime is taking over our financial markets. He dropped the word "billions." But while many a politician (and movie-maker) likes to suggest that the criminals are bigger than US Steel, we here at the Glom know that you sorta need to read between the lines when the leadership starts talking about secret conspiracies. What was Mukasey really after? Al Qaeda? Banks annoyed by their reporting requirements? Did he want to justify FinCEN's budget? The speech looks a bit directed at Congress ("we're starting a task force with your money!"), a bit directed at foreign governments ("we love it when you let the FBI come and visit!"), and a bit directed at the ... Russians?
The criminals operating these schemes are willing to move money for anyone who needs to hide the source, ownership, or destination of the funds--no questions asked. They corrupt banking officials and exploit lax anti-money-laundering protections around the world to inject illicit funds into the global money stream. By all estimates, such schemes move billions of dollars every year through U.S. financial institutions.
A good example is the case of Garri Grigorian, a Russian national living in the United States who helped launder more than $130 million on behalf of the Moscow-based Intellect Bank and its customers, through bank accounts in Sandy, Utah. Grigorian and his co-conspirators set up three U.S. shell companies, and then set up bank accounts for those companies in Utah and New York.
UPDATE: Click through to see the other two mentions of Russia in the speech, not to mention the Eastern European ones. And here's the Law Blog's take.
Bob Lawless explores why people don't walk away from homes with underwater mortgages.
