The Chapter 14 Proposal in the Senate
by | posted in: Financial Firms and Safe Harbors | 0

Author: Stephen D. Adams*

[This week the Roundtable looks at the Chapter 14 proposal in the Senate.  This post provides an overview of Chapter 14 as background to Bruce Grohsgal’s thoughtful piece from the ABI Journal available here.]

The Taxpayer Protection and Responsible Resolution Act of 2014 (S. 1861), commonly known as “Chapter 14”, aims to “end ‘too big to fail’ by repealing Dodd-Frank’s Title II” and “replacing it with a bankruptcy process” capable of safely resolving a Systemically Important Financial Institution.

The Chapter 14 proposal envisions a number of changes to the bankruptcy process, grouped into a new bankruptcy chapter (hence “Chapter 14”, a previously unused chapter) that would be available to bank holding companies. Chapter 14 would be run by a special group of financially experienced district judges, could allow for the FDIC to be appointed as trustee, and would have no period of plan exclusivity. In order to effect a quick sale similar to the FDIC’s single point of entry strategy for Title II, the Senate bill would add a two-day stay to bankruptcy’s swap safe harbors to give the trustee a chance to transfer the entire swap portfolio to a new company that is solvent. Repos, however, are treated like secured debt, but with the ability to immediately sell off high quality collateral (though not non-agency Mortgage-Backed Securities).

The Senate Bill draws on work from the Hoover Institution’s Resolution Project that proposed the original Chapter 14 in 2009 and 2010 and updated it recently.

Documents related to the original Chapter 14 proposal work, including proponents’ descriptions of the case for a new Chapter 14, can be found here. The text of S. 1861 can be found here. Professor Thomas Jackson’s Congressional testimony about Chapter 14 in 2014 can be found here.

*Editor, Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable, and Research Director, Harvard Law School Bankruptcy and Corporate Restructuring Project.

Practitioners, Academics, and a Judge Testify about Safe Harbors before Congress
by | posted in: Financial Firms and Safe Harbors | 0

Author: Stephen D. Adams

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial, and Antitrust Law has held two sets of hearings in recent months on the bankruptcy safe harbors for repos and derivatives from the automatic stay, from preference and fraudulent conveyance law, and from the limitations on ipso facto clauses.

This past Wednesday, March 26, Judge Christopher Sontchi, Seth Grosshandler, Jane Vris, Thomas Jackson, and Michelle Harner testified. Last December, Jeffrey Lacker, Donald Bernstein, and Mark Roe testified.

Judge Sontchi argued that the 546(e)’s exception for all settlement transactions is too broad and also urged Congress to narrow the safe harbors for repos. Seth Grosshandler, of Cleary Gottlieb, reported on the work of the ABI safe harbors advisory committee (which includes both Judge Sontchi and Prof. Roe) and warned that the safe harbors are complex and potentially costly to alter.  Jane Vris, representing the National Bankruptcy Conference (NBC), and Thomas Jackson, professor at the University of Rochester, testified on bankruptcy of SIFIs as an alternative to Dodd Frank resolution of bail-out.  Michelle Harner, professor at University of Maryland School of Law, testified in her role as the Reporter to the ABI Commission on Bankruptcy Reform about the Commission.

Mark Roe, professor at Harvard Law School, testified that the safe harbors facilitate excessive short-term funding of financial institutions and impede effective resolution of large financial failures, like that of Lehman in 2008.  Donald Bernstein, of Davis Polk, a member of the ABI bankruptcy commission, testified about the bankruptcy adjustments needed to adapt bankruptcy law to the FDIC’s Single Point of Entry resolution mechanisms.  Jeffrey Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, testified about the importance of bankruptcy reform to reduce the problem of too-big-to-fail and reduce reliance on short-term debt.

The written testimonies are linked above, and the video of the oral testimonies for the March 26th hearing will be found here once it has been posted, and is here for the December 3rd hearing.

For more on the bankruptcy safe harbors for derivatives and repurchase agreements, please see the post by Steven L. Schwarcz and Ori Sharon summarizing their recent paper, The Bankruptcy-Law Safe Harbor for Derivatives: A Path-Dependence Analysis, and the post by Kathryn Borgeson, Mark Ellenberg, Lary Stromfeld, and John Thompson, entitled Lehman Bankruptcy Court Issues Safe Harbor Decision, summarizing a recent Lehman case decision on the safe harbors, both published Tuesday.

Bankruptcy and Economic Recovery
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Workouts and Pre-Packs | 0

Authors: Thomas Jackson & David Skeel

A striking feature of the recent economic crisis was the long period of subpar economic growth that continued even after the crisis had officially ended.  Although discussion about how to spur economic recovery has focused on the efficacy of Keynesian stimulus spending, this is only one of many factors that might plausibly encourage growth.  For a book entitled “Financial Restructuring to Sustain Recovery,” published by the Brookings Institution, we were asked to discuss the role that bankruptcy policy plays, or might play, in economic recovery.

After summarizing how bankruptcy posits a collective solution to a common pool problem of individual creditors and thereby improves the efficient use of assets, we consider two obstacles to its effectiveness.  The first is that bankruptcy proceedings often seem to begin too late.  The increased influence of debtors’ principal lenders probably counteracts this problem in part, but we suspect not fully.  We consider a wide range of strategies that lawmakers might use to encourage timely filing, some of which are fairly simple, while others are more speculative.

The second major issue is the relationship between bankruptcy and jobs.  The question whether bankruptcy should be used to protect jobs is a recurring theme that came to the fore most recently when the government used bankruptcy to bail out Chrysler, justifying its intervention as preserving jobs.  We caution that distorting the standard bankruptcy rules—focused on efficient use of assets—to save jobs in the short run may have more problematic effects overall.

The full-length article can be found here.