Bank Failure: Lessons from Lehman Brothers (Hardcover)

This new book analyses the legal and practical issues experienced during the Lehman Brothers litigation, the largest and most complex bankruptcy proceedings in history. By examining the issues the work provides a useful reference source for future large scale and cross-border bankruptcy proceedings of multinational groups. The author team includes experts from the various jurisdictions in which Lehman Brothers was operative, many of whom were involved in the litigation. The authors set out practical solutions to the issues faced, concerning, for example, the use of existing payment and settlement systems for consent solicitation, and filing instructions and insolvency distributions. Economic challenges, such as the valuation of distressed financial instruments, are also considered. Additionally, the book provides a critique of the current law, analysis of the interpretation and scope of core legal principles and makes recommendations for regulatory reform and judicial cooperation. In this book first-hand accounts by key parties in the insolvency proceedings with expertise on the main issues are complemented by the views of selected independent experts to provide the first complete work on this ground-breaking litigation.

General

Imprint:	Oxford UniversityPress
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	March 2017
Editors:	Dennis Faber (Professor of Private and Commercial Law) • Niels Vermunt (Senior Researcher in Private and Commercial Law)
Dimensions:	248 x 182 x 31mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	432
ISBN-13:	978-0-19-875537-1
Categories:	Books > Law > Laws of other jurisdictions & general law > Financial, taxation, commercial, industrial law > Financial law > Banking law Books > Law > Laws of other jurisdictions & general law > Financial, taxation, commercial, industrial law > Financial law > Bankruptcy & insolvency law
LSN:	0-19-875537-6
Barcode:	9780198755371

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Review This Product

TOO BIG TO FAIL?

Tue, 23 May 2017 | Review by: Phillip T.

TOO BIG TO FAIL? NOT IF YOUR NAME’S LEHMAN BROTHERS – AND HERE’S A LEGAL TEXT THAT TELLS THE FULL STORY An appreciation by Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers and Phillip Taylor MBE of “The Barrister” You might say that the downfall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was meteoric. Plunging from the stratosphere of success recorded in January of that year, it crashed to earth eight months later. It was too big to fail, but it did. The repercussions were far-reaching and generated what almost became a worldwide economic catastrophe. The reasons why, being many and manifold, have resulted in much comment and analysis over the years, including, latterly, this recently published and most impressive legal text from the Oxford University Press. Surely ‘Bank Failure’ will become the definitive work of reference on this vexed subject. As a pivotal point in legal as well as economic history, the Lehman Brothers disaster makes riveting reading, especially if you happen to be a lawyer. Page after page, this volume reveals the bewildering mixed-signals confusion that preceded the catastrophic failure of this apparently unassailable bank which ranked fourth behind Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Morgan Stanley and ahead of J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Citi, Lazard, Credit Suisse and UBS. In January 2008, its stock reached a high of $65.73 per share. Eight months later its share price plummeted to $4.00, a decline of almost ninety-five per cent. One of the key questions that emerges from this analysis is ‘where were the regulators?’ Turns out there were several of them, including the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), the Federal Reserve, the FRBNY (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) and a number of others – and in addition to those, the European Union. Interestingly, the major investment banks preferred the SEC regulation to EU regulation. The crucial point made here was that ‘no one agency was clearly in charge.’ It seems, for example, that the FRBNY, according the authors, ‘did not take steps to ensure that the SEC had the same information it had about the over-reporting of Lehman’s liquidity pool.’ The more simple minded among us who do not speak bank-speak will interpret this to mean that Lehman’s had a lot less money than it said it did. As Lehman Brothers was a truly global institution with global reach and influence, this book is divided into three parts under three headings: the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. There are references to other regions, particularly those in Asia. Some litigation is still pending, say the authors who also remark that ‘the sums at stake and the legal questions that had to be addressed were unprecedented in terms of scope and complexity.’ This must be one of the few legal texts around that reads almost like a medieval cautionary tale, albeit a detailed and protracted one, based on thorough and detailed research and also the personal experience and familiarity with the Lehman Brothers matter on the part of the majority of the of the book’s twenty-two contributors who include main insiders and third party experts. Also note the Foreword by Lord Justice Briggs whose 2012 Denning Lecture on the Lehman collapse has been included in Part II. The authors express the hope that the book will be of interest to policymakers practitioners, academics and students -- and, one must add, anyone involved in any aspect of financial services. The publication date is cited as at 2017.

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