February 2016

RRWe may be approaching a tipping point where the burden of the new federal regulatory state, purportedly designed to make our economy stronger by making the banking system safer, will begin to demonstrably become a cure that’s worse than the disease. To my eye, much of the new regulatory apparatus feels like political theatre designed to impress the financial illiterate. Random chest thumping for populist cred on the cynical assumption that the system is big enough and robust enough to tolerate all this tampering.   Of course, I could be wrong and our policy elites could really be doing all this fiddling from an honest embrace of a simplistic, jejune analysis of extremely complex systems which they largely do not understand. I’m not sure which explanation scares me more.
Continue Reading Risk Retention and the Regulatory State: What It Means to “The Folks” in 2016 and Beyond

Dechert’s Antitrust Merger Investigation Timing Tracker (DAMITT) is at it again compiling data from 2015.

Fast Facts

  • DAMITT- Vuture graphics - 01-16-02Merger investigations in 2015 took an average of
    9.6 months to conduct (more than 1/3 longer than the average from 2011-2013)
  • Federal enforcement activity resulted in 37 significant merger investigations (7 generated complaints seeking to block proposed deals and 24 were resolved by consent orders)
  • Each of these figures was a record for the 5 years in which DAMITT has been tracking antitrust merger investigations

Continue Reading DAMITT – How Long Does it Take to Conduct U.S. Antitrust Merger Investigations? (Update)

An overvalued property may now have a bigger impact on a secured creditor’s bottom-line during bankruptcy.  Splitting with the Seventh Circuit, the Fifth Circuit in Southwest Securities, FSB v. Segner (In the Matter of Domistyle, Inc.), 2015 WL 9487732, held that a bankruptcy trustee may surcharge its expenses for maintaining a property even before moving to abandon the property.
Continue Reading Secured Creditors Beware: Overvalued Properties in Bankruptcy

The recently enacted Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 amended the existing rules governing tax audits of partnerships in the U.S.

Who Does this Effect and When?

The new rules primarily impact partnerships with more than 100 partners and will generally apply to partnership taxable years after December 31, 2017. A partnership may elect to apply the new rules to tax returns for partnership taxable years after November 2, 2015 and before January 1, 2018. Certain partnerships with 100 (or fewer) partners may opt to elect out of the new rules and instead be subject to audits at the partner level.
Continue Reading What Are the New Partnership Audit Rules?

That whole alternate universe thing, the conceit of so many sci-fi novels, is clearly not merely the product of fevered minds.  It’s real.  Or, at least it seemed awfully real after having been at the CREFC meeting in Miami and the MBA/CREF meeting in Orlando during the past month.
Continue Reading CREFC and MBA/CREF: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Alternate Universes