Do the Financial Institution Bankruptcy Act and the CHOICE Act Undermine an Effective Restructuring of a Failing Financial Institution?
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Financial Firms and Safe Harbors | 0

By Bruce Grohsgal (Delaware Law School, Widener University)

The House recently passed the Financial Institution Bankruptcy Act of 2017 (FIBA). FIBA’s provisions are incorporated into the Financial CHOICE Act of 2017, passed by the House last week, which would repeal Dodd-Frank’s receiverships for failing financial institutions that pose risk to the financial system. The Senate may soon consider both bills.

FIBA creates a subchapter V of chapter 11 for financial institutions. Only the holding company will file. In the first 48 hours of the case, it will transfer certain assets—consisting primarily of its equity in its subsidiaries and its derivatives—to a newly-formed bridge company. It will leave behind pre-designated “bail-in debt,” mostly unsecured term obligations owed to 401ks and pensions and shorter term unsecured trade debt.

In my view, however, FIBA is unlikely to result in an effective restructuring. First, because of FIBA’s 48-hour deadline, individual determinations likely will not be made with respect to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of repo, derivatives, and other qualified financial contracts. Instead, the entire book of financial contracts—the “bad” along with the “good”—likely will be transferred to the bridge company. The bankruptcy court’s jurisdiction over the bridge company and its property—and the restructuring—ends on the transfers.

Second, the bridge company must assume 100% of the debt secured by any property transferred—without any write down, even if the property is worth less than the claim—and all liabilities owed on the derivatives and repo transferred. These statutory provisions may weaken the bridge company’s balance sheet and imperil its ability to obtain financing.

Though the Federal Reserve’s total loss-absorbing capacity (TLAC) rule includes “clean holding company” requirements to facilitate restructuring, the rule does not adequately address these balance sheet ills that FIBA creates. The clean holding company requirements apply only to eight U.S. global systemically important banks, and do not reach dozens of $50+ billion banks or nearly 5,000 other FIBA-eligible financial institutions. Moreover, TLAC does not prohibit secured borrowing even by those eight bank holding companies, though undersecured borrowings by those eight banks may be limited by TLAC’s regulatory capital requirements. But at a time of declining asset values and a ramp-up to a subchapter V filing, it is likely that many previously fully secured loans will have become undersecured. FIBA will require the bridge bank to either assume the unsecured portion of the debt or lose the collateral to the lender.

FIBA’s bankruptcy proceeding makes a run by the bridge company’s derivatives and repo counterparties more likely. If the bridge company’s balance sheet is weakened by the wholesale assumption of qualified financial contracts and by the assumption of debt above asset value, then the bridge company’s ability to obtain new financing may be diminished. Actions against the bridge company and its assets are not stayed under FIBA. As a result, when repo lenders and other counterparties require post-transfer haircuts and margin payments, and the bridge company is unable to obtain new funding, the run on repo and derivatives will continue.

The text of FIBA is available here. My testimony on FIBA before the House Judiciary’s subcommittee is available here. The text of The Financial CHOICE Act of 2017 is available here. The “clean holding company” requirements of TLAC are at 12 CFR § 252.64, and the TLAC final rule release is available here.

Too Big and Unable to Fail
by | posted in: Financial Firms and Safe Harbors | 0

By Stephen J. Lubben (Seton Hall University School of Law) and Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr. (George Washington University Law School)

Financial regulation after the Dodd-Frank Act has produced a host of new regulatory tools for resolving failures of systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs). The explicit goal of this new “resolution” regime is to enable SIFIs to go bankrupt without a government bailout, just like other businesses. In our paper, forthcoming in the Florida Law Review, however, we express significant doubts about the new regime’s ability to work as advertised.

The “single point of entry” (SPOE) strategy, which focuses all resolution efforts on a SIFI’s parent holding company, addresses a very stylized, even hypothetical sort of failure. We believe that it is unlikely to work during a global crisis that involves multiple failing SIFIs operating thousands of subsidiaries across dozens of national boundaries.

The Federal Reserve’s “total loss absorbing capacity” (TLAC) proposal is closely tied to SPOE. It would require SIFI holding companies to issue large amounts of debt securities that can be “bailed in” (converted into equity) in a resolution proceeding to make the holding company solvent again. In our view, TLAC debt will also create a new, more opaque way to impose the costs of SIFIs’ financial distress on ordinary citizens, because retail investors in brokerage accounts, mutual funds, and pension funds are likely to be the largest TLAC debtholders.

We propose several strategies for forcing SIFIs and their Wall Street creditors to internalize at least some of the costs of the enormous risks they create. Among other things, mutual funds and pension funds that invest in TLAC debt should disclose the bail-in risks to investors and should include in their offering materials “black box” warnings similar to those already used in selling junk bonds to investors. In addition, each SIFI should describe its resolution plan on a web page that also contains a straightforward discussion of the risks TLAC debtholders are taking on—risks that creditors and counterparties of operating subsidiaries are unwilling to assume. Only with such disclosures can the hazards of TLAC debt be appropriately priced by the market.

The full paper can be found here.

 

Establishing “Credible Losers” at Systemically Important Bank Holding Companies
by | posted in: Financial Firms and Safe Harbors | 0

By John Crawford, UC Hastings College of Law

Systemically important bank holding companies (“SIBs”) have always had an abundance of creditors that can legally absorb losses in the event of failure. The SIB bailouts of 2008, however, were driven by regulators’ unwillingness to allow losses to fall on these creditors. The Fed has recently proposed a rule requiring SIBs to issue large quantities of “loss-absorbing” long-term debt (“LTD”) out of their parent holding companies. If, however, regulators were averse to haircuts for SIB creditors before, how will creating a new class of debt help? I attempt to answer this question here. First, regulators fear the consequences of loss or delay for SIBs’ short-term creditors. These consequences include, inter alia, the risk of “contagion by simile,” as short-term creditors of other SIBs “run” to avoid a similar fate. This risk does not extend to long-term debt per se. The challenge of imposing losses on long-term debt while protecting short-term debt goes beyond mere repayment priority, however, as involuntary haircuts typically require a bankruptcy or resolution process that creates the risk of uncertainty or delay for all claims—potentially triggering the very contagion dynamics regulators wish to avoid. I nevertheless argue that the combination of a “single point of entry” resolution strategy for SIBs and a set of proposed “clean holding company” requirements plausibly solves the problem for LTD, so that it can absorb losses without creating these risks. In short, LTD may be the “credible loser” that SIBs previously lacked.

 

The full article may be found here.