The FinReg Pod

At $1.9 trillion dollars, the recently signed American Rescue Plan is the largest spending bill in U.S. history and it provides much needed direct relief to millions of Americans who have been struggling for over a year while Covid-19 wreaked havoc on our health and our economy.  In this episode, Vanguard's global chief economist,  Joe Davis , talks about the impact certain provisions in the stimu...

David Berger  is a partner at Wilson Sonsini in Silicon Valley, where he specializes in corporate governance and M&A litigation as well as rapid response shareholder activism. More importantly for this conversation, David served on the Commission responsible for developing the  Framework for Inclusive Capitalism  which was released in February. David spoke about how the Commission came together an...

The recent GameStop fiasco has given new momentum to the concept of a financial transactions tax. In this episode,  Lenore Palladino  explains why we need a financial transactions tax and sheds insights on recent state and federal proposals to tax financial transactions. Lenore is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as well as a fellow at the Roosevelt In...

Ant Group, operator of Chinese payment behemoth Alipay, was set to have the largest IPO in history last November before Chinese regulators suddenly pulled the plug. In this episode,  Martin Chorzempa  from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, talks about the Chinese government's response to the emergence of fintech, the evolution of Ant's business model in recent years, what Ant's s...

GameStop has captured the public's imagination in a way no other finance-related story has since the financial crisis. In this special double episode, we cover GameStop and its broader implications from all angles. In part one, Ty Gellasch discusses the potential legal liability some of the folks on Reddit's Wall Street Bets forum may be facing, the issues around clearing and settlement as well as...

Jeff Naimon  and  Sasha Leonhardt  from Buckley LLP break down the likely course of consumer financial regulation under the Biden administration. In this episode they spoke about President Biden's nominee to lead the CFPB, what the Bureau's priorities are likely to be in the short and long-term, and what it's like for financial services firms to have to deal with dramatic swings in consumer financ...

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs,  have become one of the hottest things in finance over the past year. In this episode, Shami Patel talks about why SPACs have become an attractive option for private companies that want to go public, how a typical SPAC is structured, and his thoughts on some of the more common SPAC critiques. Shami has worked on multiple fintech focused SPACs during...

Liam Vaughan discusses the incredible story of how the price of oil went to negative $38 per barrel on April 20 th , 2020 and the tight knit crew of suburban London traders who made a king's ransom when it did. Liam is a senior reporter with Bloomberg and Businessweek magazine in London. His December 10 th  article in Businessweek, co-written with Kit Chellel and Benjamin Bain, is tilted "The Esse...

2020 was a critical year in the continued expansion of the cryptocurrency market and not just because the year ended with Bitcoin's price at an all-time high of close to $30,000. In this episode,  Tim Swanson  breaks down major developments in the cryptocurrency market over the past year; from the rise of stablecoins and central bank digital currencies, to regulatory crackdowns on crypto firms. Ti...

Terri Friedline is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work and author of the recently released book:  Banking on a Revolution: Why Financial Technology Won't Save a Broken System . The book examines how the existing financial system discriminates against the poor and people of color, and makes the case for a new, revolutionized financial system that centers the n...

Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977 to encourage depository institutions to meet the credit needs of lower income neighborhoods. The last major changes to the regulations implementing CRA came in 1995, which has led to no shortage of calls to modernize CRA for our digital era. In this episode, Jesse Van Tol, CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, offers his...

Jesse Hamilton McCoy II  is the James Scott Farrin Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law and supervising attorney for the  Duke Law Civil Justice Clinic . Jesse also runs the Durham County eviction diversion program in partnership with Legal Aid of North Carolina and the Durham County Department of Social Services. In this episode, Jesse discusses the impact of various state and federal eviction moratoria...

Art Wilmarth is Professor Emeritus at The George Washington University Law School and author of  Taming the Megabanks: Why We Need a New Glass-Steagall Act . The book traces the evolution of the US banking sector from the late 19th century to today, and demonstrates that universal banks were at the center of the great Depression and the Great Recession of 2007-09. In this episode, Art makes the ca...

Bob Litterman is chairman of the Risk Committee and a founding partner at Kepos Capital. Bob was also the chairman of the CFTC's Climate-Related Market Risk Subcommittee which last month released a comprehensive report that identifies climate change as a systemic risk to the U.S. financial system and presents 53 detailed policy recommendations, the first of which is the need for an economy wide pr...

Dick Kovacevich was CEO of Wells Fargo from 1998 until 2007, during which time he built the company into a banking powerhouse. Dick ' s relentless focus on selling Wells Fargo ' s customers as many products as possible is what made Wells such a widely admired company, but it also sowed the seeds of Wells   Fargo's   later problems. In this episode Dick discusses his philosophy of banking and the f...

Climate change poses a "slow motion" systemic threat to the stability of the U.S. financial system requiring urgent action from financial regulators, including the Federal Reserve and the Securities Exchange Commission. That is one of the findings of a recently released landmark report commissioned by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and put together by a panel convened about 10 month...

Richard Cordray served as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). His new book, "Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy," shows how the Bureau quickly became a powerful force for good, suing big banks for cheating or deceiving consumers, putting limits on predatory lenders, simplifying mortgage paperwork, and stepping...

Rodney Hood is the first African-American to lead a federal banking regulatory agency, the National Credit Union Administration-the independent agency that oversees the nation's federally insured credit unions. Since entering the role last year, Chairman Hood has focused on building and reinforcing places that have fallen behind, often in areas where opportunity is limited, like hard-pressed urban...

Jim Sills, CEO and President of M&F Bank in Durham, North Carolina, joins us to discuss the role of Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs), the challenges they are facing during the pandemic, and the opportunities presented by a renewed focus on supporting black owned banks in the wake of George Floyd's death. M&F Bank was founded in 1907 by a group of nine successful African American businessmen...

In this episode, Liam Vaughan discusses his new book: " Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History ."  The Flash Crash occurred on May 6th, 2010, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged roughly 9% in a matter of minutes only to recover a large part of the loss within half-an-hour. Liam's book is a fascinating account of how the U.S. gover...

On Thursday, June 25th, the Federal Reserve released the results of its annual bank stress testing exercise. Due to the ongoing pandemic and the economic recession it has caused, there was added attention on this year's results. In this episode, Greg Gelzinis explains what the stress tests do and do not reveal, and what risks remain to the banking sector. Gregg is a senior policy analyst for Econo...

The coronavirus pandemic has upended American capitalism and forced the federal government to spend unprecedented sums of money to support struggling consumers and businesses. Thus far, Congress has enacted four separate pieces of legislation, costing approximately $2.4 trillion, with many arguing that more is needed to prevent Great Depression levels of unemployment and reduced economic activity....

The country's response to COVID-19 has constrained economic activity, dramatically reducing or eliminating the income of millions of workers.  With enactment of the CARES Act, homeowners with Federally-backed mortgage loans (backed or owned by HUD, FHA, VA, USDA, Freddie Mac, or Fannie Mae) are entitled to up to six months of payment forbearance, which may be extended up to a year, upon a simple a...

A key feature of the recently passed $2 trillion stimulus package, also known as the CARES act, is the Paycheck Protection Program, which is a Small Business Administration (SBA) fully guaranteed loan program designed to provide a direct incentive for small businesses to keep their workers on the payroll. The program launched April 3rd and has received a lot of attention due to its perceived slopp...

The coronavirus pandemic has upended American capitalism and forced the Federal Reserve to take drastic steps to keep money flowing throughout the financial system. The Fed has dusted off its 2007-09 financial crisis playbook and expanded it with unprecedented lending facilities that target corporate America directly. What is the purpose of these programs, how do they work, and what tools remain i...