Description

Following the near collapse of the biggest western banks in the period of 2008- 2009 and the ensuing offers of public support (bailouts) to avoid the liquidation of these institutions and the systemic threats that would go with it the world’s biggest jurisdictions have grappled with the issue of the the Too-Big-To-Fail institution (TBTF). To this effect the USA through the Orderly Liquidation Authority Section of the the Dodd-Frank Act and the EU by means of the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) have built robust bank resolution regimes. These regimes are guided in part by the Financial Stability Board’s “Key Attributes for Effective Resolution”. The guiding principles of the new resolution regimes are facilitation of orderly failure in order to mitigate the TBTF effect, alongside structural reforms, and avoidance of bailouts which in some sense amount to a public subsidy to the banking sector. The key legal device invented to force banks to internalize the costs of their failures are so-called bail-in provisions under which any excess bank losses are absorbed by bank creditors (bondholders and uninsured depositors) rather than the public purse. But key challenges remain. First cross-border bank resolution is a fiendishly complex exercise with the important question of who provides liquidity to the group or the parts of it under resolution virtually unanswered. Secondly, the bail-in regimes are untested in terms of systemic consequences, raise important legal questions, and their effectiveness when it comes to loss absorption remains questionable. This lecture will present the main features of the new regimes and the magnitude of remaining bank resolution challenges and will in turn consider each of the key resolution questions. In this context the lecture will attempt to offer comprehensive answers including in cross-border context.

About The Speaker

Professor Avgouleas is the holder of the International Banking Law and Finance Chair at Edinburgh University and the director of the Edinburgh LLM in International Banking Law and Finance. He is a member of the Stakeholder Group of the European Banking Authority (EBA) in the (so-called) ‘top-ranking’ academics section and member of Eurogroup select panel for the Greek banking sector. In Spring term/2016 Emilios was a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and will be a visiting professor fellow at Harvard in the Fall.

Emilios is a leading expert on financial market regulation, banking law and finance, and global economic governance. He has given keynote lectures, research seminars, and conference papers in a plethora of leading academic and public policy institutions. He has authored a large number of scholarly articles and two research monographs: Governance of Global Financial Markets (Cambridge, 2012); The Mechanics and Regulation of Market Abuse (Oxford, 2005). More recently he has authored Part 1 of Cranston, Avgouleas, et al. Principles of Banking Law (Oxford, 3rd. ed., 2016) and co-edited/co-authored Reconceptualizing International Finance and its Regulation (Cambridge, 2016). Emilios has practised in the broader field of International finance, including as an Associate with Clifford Chance LLP and as a Managing Associate with Linklaters.