Securities Regulation

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Alternative mutual funds, with assets under management reported from $300-500 billion, mimic riskier investment strategies employed by hedge funds such as investing in commodities, private debt, shorting assets and complex derivatives.  The trading strategies, as you can guess, are funded through higher fees charged to investors.  The funds are touted as a new way for mainstream investors to diversify their assets.  Forbes ran a great, short piece back in February describing the investment advantages and disadvantages of alternative mutual funds.

These alternative mutual funds are now in the cross hairs of the SEC and FINRA, the self-regulatory branch of the securities industries.  FINRA issued an Investor Alert on “alt” funds in June, available here.  The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the SEC will conduct a limited scope (15-20 funds) national sweep to identify fund oversight, ready assets, and disclosure of investment strategies.  Included in the funds sweep are large investment firms such as BlackRock and AQR Capital Management, as well smaller firms that are new market entrants.

For additional information on Alternative Funds, see the 2013 report issues by SEI, available here, compiling available data on these funds.

-Anne Tucker

Ah, yes . . . .  The public/private divide . . . .  My co-blogger Ann Lipton fairly begged me to write about this topic today, given that she had to miss the discussion session on the subject (entitled “Does The Public/Private Divide In Federal Securities Regulation Make Sense?”) convened by me and Michael Guttentag at last week’s Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) annual conference.  Arm-twisting aside, however, this is a topic of current interest (and actively engaged scholarship) for me.

The discussion session allowed a bunch of our corporate and securities law colleagues to explore historical, present, and projected future distinctions between public and private offerings and public and private companies/firms.  The discussion ranged widely, as did the short papers submitted by the participants.  Some topics of conversation were oriented in part toward corporate governance concerns–comments from Lisa Fairfax on linkages to shareholder empowerment and from Jill Fisch on executive compensation in the post-Dodd-Frank public environment come to mind in this regard.  Other discussion topics engaged securities regulation more centrally, including by, e.g., questioning the coherence of the rationale underlying the Section 12(g) and 15(d) reporting thresholds (with interesting commentary from Amanda Rose and Usha Rodrigues); offering…

On June 5, 2014, SEC Commissioner Dan Gallagher commemorated the agency’s 80th anniversary by, among other things, repeating the criticisms of the various nonfinancial disclosures that companies are compelled to make by law or asked to make through shareholder proposals. In his view, “companies’ disclosure documents are being cluttered with non-material information that can drown out or obscure the information that is at the core of a reasonable investor’s investment decision.  The Commission is not spending nearly enough time making sure that our rules elicit focused, meaningful disclosures of material information.” I assume that he is referring to the various environmental, social and governance proposals (“ESG”) brought by socially responsible investors and others. I’m writing this blog post while taking a break from reviewing dozens of these proposals for an article that I am writing on how consumers and investors evaluate ESG disclosures and those required in other countries in the human rights context.

Citing Chair White’s quote about “information overload,” last week the US Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness released a list of relatively non-controversial recommendations on how the SEC can modernize the current disclosure regime so that it can better serve the investing public.

Warning- do not click on the first link if you do not want to see nudity.

Dov Charney founded retailer American Apparel in 1998 and it became an instant sensation with its 20-something year old consumer base. He mixed a “made in America- sweatshop free” CSR focus with a very sexy/sexual set of ads (hence the warning- – when I first created the link, the slideshow went from a topless “Eugenia in disco pants in menthe” (seriously) to a shot of adorable children’s clothing in about 10 seconds).  No wonder my 18-year old son, who leaves for art school in two weeks, appreciates the ad campaigns. Most of his friends do too- both the males and females. In fact, he indicated that although they all know about the “sweatshop free” ethos, because “it’s in your face when you walk in the stores,” that’s not what draws them to the clothes. As a person who blogs and writes about human rights and supply chains, I almost wish he had lied to me. But he’s no different than many consumers who over-report their interest in ethical sourcing, but then tend to buy based on quality, price and convenience. I am still researching…

The new crowdfunding exemption in section 4(a)(6) of the Securities Act will, once the SEC adopts the rules required to implement it, allow ordinary investors to invest in unregistered securities offerings. Will those unsophisticated investors go down in flames or will they be able to make rational investment choices?

Some proponents of crowdfunding argue that crowdfunding benefits from the so-called “wisdom of the crowd“: that the collective, consensus choice that results from crowdfunding is better than what any individual could do alone, and often as good as expert choices. A recent study seems to support that view.

Two business professors—Ethan R. Mollick at the Wharton School and Ramana Nanda at Harvard—looked at crowdfunding campaigns for theater projects. They submitted those projects to people with expertise in evaluating theater funding applications and compared the expert evaluations to the actual crowdfunding results.

Mollick and Nanda found a strong positive correlation between the projects funded by the crowd and those rated highly by the experts. In other words, crowds were more likely to fund the campaigns the experts preferred. In addition, projects funded by the crowd that were not rated highly by the experts did just as well as the…

As many have celebrated or decried, Dodd-Frank turned four-years old this week. This is the law that Professor Stephen Bainbridge labeled “quack federal corporate governance round II” (round I was Sarbanes-Oxley, as labeled by Professor Roberta Romano). Some, like Professor Bainbridge, think the law has gone too far and has not only failed to meet its objectives but has actually caused more harm than good (see here, for example).  Some think that the law has not gone far enough, or that the law as drafted will not prevent the next financial crisis (see here, for example). The Council on Foreign Relations discusses the law in an accessible manner with some good links here.

SEC Chair Mary Jo White has divided Dodd-Frank’s ninety-five mandates into eight categories. She released a statement last week touting the Volcker Rule, the new regulatory framework for municipal advisors, additional controls on broker-dealers that hold customer assets, reduced reliance on credit ratings, new rules for unregulated derivatives, additional executive compensation disclosures, and mechanisms to bar bad actors from securities offerings. 

Notwithstanding all of these accomplishments, only a little over half of the law is actually in place. In fact, according to the…

Cross-post alert!

At the risk of overdoing what may have been a good thing, I contributed a disclosure-oriented post to the Hobby Lobby symposium on The Conglomerate earlier today.  It includes new information about a U.S. Department of Labor Q&A posted yesterday, among other things.  Enjoy or not, as you so please . . . .

My post last week spawned more commentary than usual–on the BLPB site and off.  So, I am regrouping on the same issue for my post today and plan to push forward a bit on some of the areas of commentary.  Also, since The Conglomerate is running a Hobby Lobby symposium this week, I thought it might be nice to offer some thoughts on disclosure up here and (maybe) later chime in at The Conglomerate on this or other issues relating to the Hobby Lobby case later in the week . . . .

A recent article discussing the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Report Card on U.S. infrastructure explains:

Without adequate investment on infrastructure the US could face a $2.4 trillion drop in consumer spending by 2020, a $1.1 trillion loss in total trade and experience the loss of 3.5 million jobs in 2020 alone.

This is just a sliver of the doom and gloom the American Society of Civil Engineers predicted this week with the release of their final report in the “Failure to Act” series that focuses on the impacts associated with continued infrastructure deterioration. The latest installment of the ASCE reports focuses on specifically on economic impacts.

Under current investment trends, only 60% of the investment funding required by 2020 will be secured and this underinvestment in infrastructure will have a “cascading impact on the nation’s economy” and culminate in a “gradual worsening of reliability over time,” Gregory E. DiLoreto, ASCE President told the participants on a conference call.

Back in 2007, I published an article titled, Misguided Energy: Why Recent Legislative, Regulatory, and Market Initiatives are Insufficient to Improve the U.S. Energy Infrastructure (here). In that article, I argued: 

Soaring energy prices, natural gas supply shortages, and blackouts

…

The Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, as noted in post-decision commentary (see, e.g., Sarah Hahn‘s guest post earlier this week), apparently relies in part on the fact that shareholders (and, potentially, employees and other relevant constituents of the firm) know that the firm has sincerely held religious beliefs and what those beliefs mean for business operations and legal compliance.  The Court does not directly address this in its opinion.  Rather, the opinion includes various references to owner engagement that imply buisness owner awareness.  The Court states:

  • For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes . . . . (Op. 23, emphasis added)

  • “So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires.” (Op. 23, emphasis added)

In making these statements and reasoning through this part of the opinion, the Court relies on state corporate law principles and allusions.

Importantly, the Court also indicates its views on how the policy underlying the RFRA favors an interpretation that includes corporations as persons:

An established body of law specifies the rights and obligations of the people (including shareholders, officers, and employees) who are associated with a corporation in one way or another. When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people. For example, extending Fourth Amendment protection to corporations protects the  privacy interests of employees and others associated with the company. Protecting corporations from government seizure of their property without just compensation protects all those who have a stake in the corporations’ financial well-being. And protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga, and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.

(Op. 18, emphasis in original)  Note how the last sentence reduces the protected category of persons under the RFRA to those who “own and control” the firm at issue.  This represents an interesting narrowing of constituency groups from the more inclusive treatment in the first sentence of the paragraph.  The reason for this narrowing may be (likely is) a practical one, evidencing judicial restraint.  The plaintiffs in the Hobby Lobby actions were those who owned or controlled the corporation, and the decision likely will be limited in its application accordingly.

Given these breadcrumbs from the Court’s opinion, should disclosure to shareholders or other constituencies be required, and if so, where would those disclosure rules reside as a matter of positive law?  A blog post may be the wrong place to begin to address this issue (which is admittedly complex and involves, potentially, areas of law somewhat unfamiliar to me).  But indulge me in a thought experiment here for a minute.