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Let’s (NOT) Stop All the Mergers: The Case for Letting the Agencies Do Their Jobs

Noah J. Phillips —  5 May 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Noah Phillips[1] (Commissioner of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission).]   

Never let a crisis go to waste, or so they say. In the past two weeks, some of the same people who sought to stop mergers and acquisitions during the bull market took the opportunity of the COVID-19 pandemic and the new bear market to call to ban M&A. On Friday, April 24th, Rep. David Cicilline proposed that a merger ban be included in the next COVID-19-related congressional legislative package.[2] By Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, warning of “predatory” M&A and private equity “vultures”, teamed up with a similar proposal.[3] 

I’m all for stopping anticompetitive M&A that we cannot resolve. In the past few months alone, the Federal Trade Commission has been quite busy, suing to stop transactions in the hospital, e-cigarette, coal, body-worn camera, razor, and gene sequencing industries, and forcing deals to stop in the pharmaceutical, medical staffing, and consumer products spaces. But is a blanket ban, unprecedented in our nation’s history, warranted, now? 

The theory that the pandemic requires the government to shut down M&A goes something like this: the antitrust agencies are overwhelmed and cannot do the job of reviewing mergers under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act, which gives the U.S. antitrust agencies advance notice of certain transactions and 30 days to decide whether to seek more information about them.[4] That state of affairs will, in turn, invite a rush of companies looking to merge with minimal oversight, exacerbating the problem by flooding the premerger notification office (PNO) with new filings. Another version holds, along similar lines, that the precipitous decline in the market will precipitate a merger “wave” in which “dominant corporations” and “private equity vultures” will gobble up defenseless small businesses. Net result: anticompetitive transactions go unnoticed and unchallenged. That’s the theory, at least as it has been explained to me. The facts are different.

First, while the restrictions related to COVID-19 require serious adjustments at the antitrust agencies just as they do at workplaces across the country (we’re working from home, dealing with remote technology, and handling kids just like the rest), merger review continues. Since we started teleworking, the FTC has, among other things, challenged Altria’s $12.8 billion investment in JUUL’s e-cigarette business and resolved competitive concerns with GE’s sale of its biopharmaceutical business to Danaher and Ossur’s acquisition of a competing prosthetic limbs manufacturer, College Park. With our colleagues at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, we announced a new e-filing system for HSR filings and temporarily suspended granting early termination. We sought voluntary extensions from companies. But, in less than two weeks, we were able to resume early termination—back to “new normal”, at least. I anticipate there may be additional challenges; and the FTC will assess constraints in real-time to deal with further disruptions. But we have not sacrificed the thoroughness of our investigations; and we will not.

Second, there is no evidence of a merger “wave”, or that the PNO is overwhelmed with HSR filings. To the contrary, according to Bloomberg, monthly M&A volume hit rock bottom in April – the lowest since 2004. As of last week, the PNO estimates nearly 60% reduction in HSR reported transactions during the past month, compared to the historical average. Press reports indicate that M&A activity is down dramatically because of the crisis. Xerox recently announced it was suspending its hostile bid for Hewlett-Packard ($30 billion); private equity firm Sycamore Partners announced it is walking away from its takeover of Victoria’s Secret ($525 million); and Boeing announced it is backing out of its merger with Embraer ($4.2 billion) — just a few examples of companies, large corporations and private equity firms alike, stopping M&A on their own. (The market is funny like that.)

Slowed M&A during a global pandemic and economic crisis is exactly what you would expect. The financial uncertainty facing companies lowers shareholder and board confidence to dive into a new acquisition or sale. Financing is harder to secure. Due diligence is postponed. Management meetings are cancelled. Agreeing on price is another big challenge. The volatility in stock prices makes valuation difficult, and lessens the value of equity used to acquire. Cash is needed elsewhere, like to pay workers and keep operations running. Lack of access to factories and other assets as a result of travel restrictions and stay-at-home orders similarly make valuation harder. Management can’t even get in a room to negotiate and hammer out the deal because of social distancing (driving a hard bargain on Zoom may not be the same).

Experience bears out those expectations. Consider our last bear market, the financial crisis that took place over a decade ago. Publicly available FTC data show the number of HSR reported transactions dropped off a cliff. During fiscal year 2009, the height of the crisis, HSR reported transactions were down nearly 70% compared to just two years earlier, in fiscal year 2007. Not surprising.

Source: https://www.ftc.gov/site-information/open-government/data-sets

Nor should it be surprising that the current crisis, with all its uncertainty and novelty, appears itself to be slowing down M&A.

So, the antitrust agencies are continuing merger review, and adjusting quickly to the new normal. M&A activity is down, dramatically, on its own. That makes the pandemic an odd excuse to stop M&A. Maybe the concern wasn’t really about the pandemic in the first place? The difference in perspective may depend on one’s general view of the value of M&A. If you think mergers are mostly (or all) bad, and you discount the importance of the market for corporate control, the cost to stopping them all is low. If you don’t, the cost is high.[5]

As a general matter, decades of research and experience tell us that the vast majority of mergers are either pro-competitive or competitively-neutral.[6] But M&A, even dramatically-reduced, also has an important role to play in a moment of economic adjustment. It helps allocate assets in an efficient manner, for example giving those with the wherewithal to operate resources (think companies, or plants) an opportunity that others may be unable to utilize. Consumers benefit if a merger leads to the delivery of products or services that one company could not efficiently provide on its own, and from the innovation and lower prices that better management and integration can provide. Workers benefit, too, as they remain employed by going concerns.[7] It serves no good, including for competition, to let companies that might live, die.[8]

M&A is not the only way in which market forces can help. The antitrust agencies have always recognized pro-competitive benefits to collaboration between competitors during times of crisis.  In 2005, after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we implemented an expedited five-day review of joint projects between competitors aimed at relief and construction. In 2017, after hurricanes Harvey and Irma, we advised that hospitals could combine resources to meet the health care needs of affected communities and companies could combine distribution networks to ensure goods and services were available. Most recently, in response to the current COVID-19 emergency, we announced an expedited review process for joint ventures. Collaboration can be concerning, so we’re reviewing; but it can also help.

Our nation is going through an unprecedented national crisis, with a horrible economic component that is putting tens of millions out of work and causing a great deal of suffering. Now is a time of great uncertainty, tragedy, and loss; but also of continued hope and solidarity. While merger review is not the top-of-mind issue for many—and it shouldn’t be—American consumers stand to gain from pro-competitive mergers, during and after the current crisis. Those benefits would be wiped out with a draconian ‘no mergers’ policy during the COVID-19 emergency. Might there be anticompetitive merger activity? Of course, which is why FTC staff are working hard to vet potentially anticompetitive mergers and prevent harm to consumers. Let’s let them keep doing their jobs.

[1] The views expressed in this blog post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Trade Commission or any other commissioner. An abbreviated version of this essay was previously published in the New York Times’ DealBook newsletter. Noah Phillips, The case against banning mergers, N.Y. Times, Apr. 27, 2020, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/business/dealbook/small-business-ppp-loans.html.

[2] The proposal would allow transactions only if a company is already in bankruptcy or is otherwise about to fail.

[3] The “Pandemic Anti-Monopoly Act” proposes a merger moratorium on (1) firms with over $100 million in revenue or market capitalization of over $100 million; (2) PE firms and hedge funds (or entities that are majority-owned by them); (3) businesses that have an exclusive patent on products related to the crisis, such as personal protective equipment; and (4) all HSR reportable transactions.

[4] Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, 15 U.S.C. § 18a. The antitrust agencies can challenge transactions after they happen, but they are easier to stop beforehand; and Congress designed HSR to give us an opportunity to do so.

[5] Whatever your view, the point is that the COVID-19 crisis doesn’t make sense as a justification for banning M&A. If ban proponents oppose M&A generally, they should come out and say that. And they should level with the public about just how much they propose to ban. The specifics of the proposals are beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s worth noting that the “large companies [gobbling] up . . . small businesses” of which Sen. Warren warns include any firm with $100 million in annual revenue and anyone making a transaction reportable under HSR. $100 million seems like a lot of money to many of us, but the Ohio State University National Center for the Middle Market defines a mid-sized company as having annual revenues between $10 million and $1 billion. Many if not most of the transactions that would be banned look nothing like the kind of acquisitions ban proponents are describing.

[6] As far back as the 1980s, the Horizontal Merger Guidelines reflected this idea, stating: “While challenging competitively harmful mergers, the Department [of Justice Antitrust Division] seeks to avoid unnecessary interference with the larger universe of mergers that are either competitively beneficial or neutral.” Horizontal Merger Guidelines (1982); see also Hovenkamp, Appraising Merger Efficiencies, 24 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 703, 704 (2017) (“we tolerate most mergers because of a background, highly generalized belief that most—or at least many—do produce cost savings or improvements in products, services, or distribution”); Andrade, Mitchell & Stafford, New Evidence and Perspectives on Mergers, 15 J. ECON. PERSPECTIVES 103, 117 (2001) (“We are inclined to defend the traditional view that mergers improve efficiency and that the gains to shareholders at merger announcement accurately reflect improved expectations of future cash flow performance.”).

[7] Jointly with our colleagues at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, we issued a statement last week affirming our commitment to enforcing the antitrust laws against those who seek to exploit the pandemic to engage in anticompetitive conduct in labor markets.

[8] The legal test to make such a showing for an anti-competitive transaction is high. Known as the “failing firm defense”, it is available only to firms that can demonstrate their fundamental inability to compete effectively in the future. The Horizontal Merger Guidelines set forth three elements to establish the defense: (1) the allegedly failing firm would be unable to meet its financial obligations in the near future; (2) it would not be able to reorganize successfully under Chapter 11; and (3) it has made unsuccessful good-faith efforts to elicit reasonable alternative offers that would keep its tangible and intangible assets in the relevant market and pose a less severe danger to competition than the actual merger. Horizontal Merger Guidelines § 11; see also Citizen Publ’g v. United States, 394 U.S. 131, 137-38 (1969). The proponent of the failing firm defense bears the burden to prove each element, and failure to prove a single element is fatal. In re Otto Bock, FTC No. 171-0231, Docket No. 9378 Commission Opinion (Nov. 2019) at 43; see also Citizen Publ’g, 394 U.S. at 138-39.

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Corporate & Securities Law, COVID-19, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Regulation, Health Care, Intellectual Property, Justice Department, Merger Guidelines, Mergers & Acquisitions, Patent, Pharmaceuticals, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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What Can the Stock Market Tell Us About the T-Mobile/Sprint Merger?

Alec Stapp —  14 February 2020

On Monday evening, around 6:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, news leaked that the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York had decided to allow the T-Mobile/Sprint merger to go through, giving the companies a victory over a group of state attorneys general trying to block the deal.

Thomas Philippon, a professor of finance at NYU, used this opportunity to conduct a quick-and-dirty event study on Twitter:

Short thread on T-Mobile/Sprint merger. There were 2 theories:

(A) It’s a 4-to-3 merger that will lower competition and increase markups.

(B) The new merged entity will be able to take on the industry leaders AT&T and Verizon.

(A) and (B) make clear predictions. (A) predicts the merger is good news for AT&T and Verizon’s shareholders. (B) predicts the merger is bad news for AT&T and Verizon’s shareholders. The news leaked at 6pm that the judge would approve the merger. Sprint went up 60% as expected. Let’s test the theories. 

Here is Verizon’s after trading price: Up 2.5%.

Here is ATT after hours: Up 2%.

Conclusion 1: Theory B is bogus, and the merger is a transfer of at least 2%*$280B (AT&T) + 2.5%*$240B (Verizon) = $11.6 billion from the pockets of consumers to the pockets of shareholders. 

Conclusion 2: I and others have argued for a long time that theory B was bogus; this was anticipated. But lobbying is very effective indeed… 

Conclusion 3: US consumers already pay two or three times more than those of other rich countries for their cell phone plans. The gap will only increase.

And just a reminder: these firms invest 0% of the excess profits. 

Philippon published his thread about 40 minutes prior to markets opening for regular trading on Tuesday morning. The Court’s official decision was published shortly before markets opened as well. By the time regular trading began at 9:30 AM, Verizon had completely reversed its overnight increase and opened down from the previous day’s close. While AT&T opened up slightly, it too had given back most of its initial gains. By 11:00 AM, AT&T was also in the red. When markets closed at 4:00 PM on Tuesday, Verizon was down more than 2.5 percent and AT&T was down just under 0.5 percent.

Does this mean that, in fact, theory A is the “bogus” one? Was the T-Mobile/Sprint merger decision actually a transfer of “$7.4 billion from the pockets of shareholders to the pockets of consumers,” as I suggested in my own tongue-in-cheek thread later that day? In this post, I will look at the factors that go into conducting a proper event study.  

What’s the appropriate window for a merger event study?

In a response to my thread, Philippon said, “I would argue that an event study is best done at the time of the event, not 16 hours after. Leak of merger approval 6 pm Monday. AT&T up 2 percent immediately. AT&T still up at open Tuesday. Then comes down at 10am.” I don’t disagree that “an event study is best done at the time of the event.” In this case, however, we need to consider two important details: When was the “event” exactly, and what were the conditions in the financial markets at that time?

This event did not begin and end with the leak on Monday night. The official announcement came Tuesday morning when the full text of the decision was published. This additional information answered a few questions for market participants: 

  • Were the initial news reports true?
  • Based on the text of the decision, what is the likelihood it gets reversed on appeal?
    • Wall Street: “Not all analysts are convinced this story is over just yet. In a note released immediately after the judge’s verdict, Nomura analyst Jeff Kvaal warned that ‘we expect the state AGs to appeal.’ RBC Capital analyst Jonathan Atkin noted that such an appeal, if filed, could delay closing of the merger by ‘an additional 4-5’ months — potentially delaying closure until September 2020.”
  • Did the Court impose any further remedies or conditions on the merger?

As stock traders digested all the information from the decision, Verizon and AT&T quickly went negative. There is much debate in the academic literature about the appropriate window for event studies on mergers. But the range in question is always one of days or weeks — not a couple hours in after hours markets. A recent paper using the event study methodology analyzed roughly 5,000 mergers and found abnormal returns of about positive one percent for competitors in the relevant market following a merger announcement. Notably for our purposes, this small abnormal return builds in the first few days following a merger announcement and persists for up to 30 days, as shown in the chart below:

As with the other studies the paper cites in its literature review, this particular research design included a window of multiple weeks both before and after the event occured. When analyzing the T-Mobile/Sprint merger decision, we should similarly expand the window beyond just a few hours of after hours trading.

How liquid is the after hours market?

More important than the length of the window, however, is the relative liquidity of the market during that time. The after hours market is much thinner than the regular hours market and may not reflect all available information. For some rough numbers, let’s look at data from NASDAQ. For the last five after hours trading sessions, total volume was between 80 and 100 million shares. Let’s call it 90 million on average. By contrast, the total volume for the last five regular trading hours sessions was between 2 and 2.5 billion shares. Let’s call it 2.25 billion on average. So, the regular trading hours have roughly 25 times as much liquidity as the after hours market. 

We could also look at relative liquidity for a single company as opposed to the total market. On Wednesday during regular hours (data is only available for the most recent day), 22.49 million shares of Verizon stock were traded. In after hours trading that same day, fewer than a million shares traded hands. You could change some assumptions and account for other differences in the after market and the regular market when analyzing the data above. But the conclusion remains the same: the regular market is at least an order of magnitude more liquid than the after hours market. This is incredibly important to keep in mind as we compare the after hours price changes (as reported by Philippon) to the price changes during regular trading hours.

What are Wall Street analysts saying about the decision?

To understand the fundamentals behind these stock moves, it’s useful to see what Wall Street analysts are saying about the merger decision. Prior to the ruling, analysts were already worried about Verizon’s ability to compete with the combined T-Mobile/Sprint entity in the short- and medium-term:

Last week analysts at LightShed Partners wrote that if Verizon wins most of the first available tranche of C-band spectrum, it could deploy 60 MHz in 2022 and see capacity and speed benefits starting in 2023.

“With that timeline, C-Band still does not answer the questions of what spectrum Verizon will be using for the next three years,” wrote LightShed’s Walter Piecyk and Joe Galone at the time.

Following the news of the decision, analysts were clear in delivering their own verdict on how the decision would affect Verizon:

“Verizon looks to us to be a net loser here,” wrote the MoffettNathanson team led by Craig Moffett.

…  

“Approval of the T-Mobile/Sprint deal takes not just one but two spectrum options off the table,” wrote Moffett. “Sprint is now not a seller of 2.5 GHz spectrum, and Dish is not a seller of AWS-4. More than ever, Verizon must now bet on C-band.”

…

LightShed also pegged Tuesday’s merger ruling as a negative for Verizon.

“It’s not great news for Verizon, given that it removes Sprint and Dish’s spectrum as an alternative, created a new competitor in Dish, and has empowered T-Mobile with the tools to deliver a superior network experience to consumers,” wrote LightShed.

…

In a note following news reports that the court would side with T-Mobile and Sprint, New Street analyst Johnathan Chaplin wrote, “T-Mobile will be far more disruptive once they have access to Sprint’s spectrum than they have been until now.”

However, analysts were more sanguine about AT&T’s prospects:

AT&T, though, has been busy deploying additional spectrum, both as part of its FirstNet build and to support 5G rollouts. This has seen AT&T increase its amount of deployed spectrum by almost 60%, according to Moffett, which takes “some of the pressure off to respond to New T-Mobile.”

Still, while AT&T may be in a better position on the spectrum front compared to Verizon, it faces the “same competitive dynamics,” Moffett wrote. “For AT&T, the deal is probably a net neutral.”

The quantitative evidence from the stock market seems to agree with the qualitative analysis from the Wall Street research firms. Let’s look at the five-day window of trading from Monday morning to Friday (today). Unsurprisingly, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Dish have reacted very favorably to the news:

Consistent with the Wall Street analysis, Verizon stock remains down 2.5 percent over a five-day window while AT&T has been flat over the same period:

How do you separate beta from alpha in an event study?

Philippon argued that after market trading may be more efficient because it is dominated by hedge funds and includes less “noise trading.” In my opinion, the liquidity effect likely outweighs this factor. Also, it’s unclear why we should assume “smart money” is setting the price in the after hours market but not during regular trading when hedge funds are still active. Sophisticated professional traders often make easy profits by picking off panicked retail investors who only read the headlines. When you see a wild swing in the markets that moderates over time, the wild swing is probably the noise and the moderation is probably the signal.

And, as Karl Smith noted, since the aftermarket is thin, price moves in individual stocks might reflect changes in the broader stock market (“beta”) more than changes due to new company-specific information (“alpha”). Here are the last five days for e-mini S&P 500 futures, which track the broader market and are traded after hours:

The market trended up on Monday night and was flat on Tuesday. This slightly positive macro environment means we would need to adjust the returns downward for AT&T and Verizon. Of course, this is counter to Philippon’s conjecture that the merger decision would increase their stock prices. But to be clear, these changes are so minuscule in percentage terms, this adjustment wouldn’t make much of a difference in this case.

Lastly, let’s see what we can learn from a similar historical episode in the stock market.

The parallel to the 2016 presidential election

The type of reversal we saw in AT&T and Verizon is not unprecedented. Some commenters said the pattern reminded them of the market reaction to Trump’s election in 2016:

Much like the T-Mobile/Sprint merger news, the “event” in 2016 was not a single moment in time. It began around 9 PM Tuesday night when Trump started to overperform in early state results. Over the course of the next three hours, S&P 500 futures contracts fell about 5 percent — an enormous drop in such a short period of time. If Philippon had tried to estimate the “Trump effect” in the same manner he did the T-Mobile/Sprint case, he would have concluded that a Trump presidency would reduce aggregate future profits by about 5 percent relative to a Clinton presidency.

But, as you can see in the chart above, if we widen the aperture of the event study to include the hours past midnight, the story flips. Markets started to bounce back even before Trump took the stage to make his victory speech. The themes of his speech were widely regarded as reassuring for markets, which further pared losses from earlier in the night. When regular trading hours resumed on Wednesday, the markets decided a Trump presidency would be very good for certain sectors of the economy, particularly finance, energy, biotech, and private prisons. By the end of the day, the stock market finished up about a percentage point from where it closed prior to the election — near all time highs.

Maybe this is more noise than signal?

As a few others pointed out, these relatively small moves in AT&T and Verizon (less than 3 percent in either direction) may just be noise. That’s certainly possible given the magnitude of the changes. Contra Philippon, I think the methodology in question is too weak to rule out the pro-competitive theory of the case, i.e., that the new merged entity would be a stronger competitor to take on industry leaders AT&T and Verizon. We need much more robust and varied evidence before we can call anything “bogus.” Of course, that means this event study is not sufficient to prove the pro-competitive theory of the case, either.

Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist of the IMF, shared Philippon’s thread on Twitter and added this comment above: “The beauty of the argument. Simple hypothesis, simple test, clear conclusion.”

If only things were so simple.

In Antitrust & Competition, Financial Regulation, Google, Mergers & Acquisitions, Platforms, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, Twitter, Wireless , , , , , , , ,
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Balancing competition and innovation in the drug industry: An evaluation of current proposals.

Joanna Shepherd —  17 May 2019

Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing, Intellectual Property and the Price of Prescription Drugs: Balancing Innovation and Competition, that explored whether changes to the pharmaceutical patent process could help lower drug prices.  The committee’s goal was to evaluate various legislative proposals that might facilitate the entry of cheaper generic drugs, while also recognizing that strong patent rights for branded drugs are essential to incentivize drug innovation.  As Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham explained:

One thing you don’t want to do is kill the goose who laid the golden egg, which is pharmaceutical development. But you also don’t want to have a system that extends unnecessarily beyond the ability to get your money back and make a profit, a patent system that drives up costs for the average consumer.

Several proposals that were discussed at the hearing have the potential to encourage competition in the pharmaceutical industry and help rein in drug prices. Below, I discuss these proposals, plus a few additional reforms. I also point out some of the language in the current draft proposals that goes a bit too far and threatens the ability of drug makers to remain innovative.  

1. Prevent brand drug makers from blocking generic companies’ access to drug samples. Some brand drug makers have attempted to delay generic entry by restricting generics’ access to the drug samples necessary to conduct FDA-required bioequivalence studies.  Some brand drug manufacturers have limited the ability of pharmacies or wholesalers to sell samples to generic companies or abused the REMS (Risk Evaluation Mitigation Strategy) program to refuse samples to generics under the auspices of REMS safety requirements.  The Creating and Restoring Equal Access To Equivalent Samples (CREATES) Act of 2019 would allow potential generic competitors to bring an action in federal court for both injunctive relief and damages when brand companies block access to drug samples.  It also gives the FDA discretion to approve alternative REMS safety protocols for generic competitors that have been denied samples under the brand companies’ REMS protocol.  Although the vast majority of brand drug companies do not engage in the delay tactics addressed by CREATES, the Act would prevent the handful that do from thwarting generic competition.  Increased generic competition should, in turn, reduce drug prices.

2. Restrict abuses of FDA Citizen Petitions.  The citizen petition process was created as a way for individuals and community groups to flag legitimate concerns about drugs awaiting FDA approval.  However, critics claim that the process has been misused by some brand drug makers who file petitions about specific generic drugs in the hopes of delaying their approval and market entry.  Although FDA has indicated that citizens petitions rarely delay the approval of generic drugs, there have been a few drug makers, such as Shire ViroPharma, that have clearly abused the process and put unnecessary strain on FDA resources. The Stop The Overuse of Petitions and Get Affordable Medicines to Enter Soon (STOP GAMES) Act is intended to prevent such abuses.  The Act reinforces the FDA and FTC’s ability to crack down on petitions meant to lengthen the approval process of a generic competitor, which should deter abuses of the system that can occasionally delay generic entry.  However, lawmakers should make sure that adopted legislation doesn’t limit the ability of stakeholders (including drug makers that often know more about the safety of drugs than ordinary citizens) to raise serious concerns with the FDA. 

3. Curtail Anticompetitive Pay-for-Delay Settlements.  The Hatch-Waxman Act incentivizes generic companies to challenge brand drug patents by granting the first successful generic challenger a period of marketing exclusivity. Like all litigation, many of these patent challenges result in settlements instead of trials.  The FTC and some courts have concluded that these settlements can be anticompetitive when the brand companies agree to pay the generic challenger in exchange for the generic company agreeing to forestall the launch of their lower-priced drug. Settlements that result in a cash payment are a red flag for anti-competitive behavior, so pay-for-delay settlements have evolved to involve other forms of consideration instead.  As a result, the Preserve Access to Affordable Generics and Biosimilars Act aims to make an exchange of anything of value presumptively anticompetitive if the terms include a delay in research, development, manufacturing, or marketing of a generic drug. Deterring obvious pay-for-delay settlements will prevent delays to generic entry, making cheaper drugs available as quickly as possible to patients. 

However, the Act’s rigid presumption that an exchange of anything of value is presumptively anticompetitive may also prevent legitimate settlements that ultimately benefit consumers.  Brand drug makers should be allowed to compensate generic challengers to eliminate litigation risk and escape litigation expenses, and many settlements result in the generic drug coming to market before the expiration of the brand patent and possibly earlier than if there was prolonged litigation between the generic and brand company.  A rigid presumption of anticompetitive behavior will deter these settlements, thereby increasing expenses for all parties that choose to litigate and possibly dissuading generics from bringing patent challenges in the first place.  Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to define these settlements as per se anticompetitive, and the FTC’s most recent agreement involving such settlements exempts several forms of exchanges of value.  Any adopted legislation should follow the FTC’s lead and recognize that some exchanges of value are pro-consumer and pro-competitive.

4. Restore the balance established by Hatch-Waxman between branded drug innovators and generic drug challengers.  I have previously discussed how an unbalanced inter partes review (IPR) process for challenging patents threatens to stifle drug innovation.  Moreover, current law allows generic challengers to file duplicative claims in both federal court and through the IPR process.  And because IPR proceedings do not have a standing requirement, the process has been exploited  by entities that would never be granted standing in traditional patent litigation—hedge funds betting against a company by filing an IPR challenge in hopes of crashing the stock and profiting from the bet. The added expense to drug makers of defending both duplicative claims and claims against challengers that are exploiting the system increases litigation costs, which may be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. 

The Hatch-Waxman Integrity Act (HWIA) is designed to return the balance established by Hatch-Waxman between branded drug innovators and generic drug challengers. It requires generic challengers to choose between either Hatch-Waxman litigation (which saves considerable costs by allowing generics to rely on the brand company’s safety and efficacy studies for FDA approval) or an IPR proceeding (which is faster and provides certain pro-challenger provisions). The HWIA would also eliminate the ability of hedge funds and similar entities to file IPR claims while shorting the stock.  By reducing duplicative litigation and the exploitation of the IPR process, the HWIA will reduce costs and strengthen innovation incentives for drug makers.  This will ensure that patent owners achieve clarity on the validity of their patents, which will spur new drug innovation and make sure that consumers continue to have access to life-improving drugs.

5. Curb illegal product hopping and patent thickets.  Two drug maker tactics currently garnering a lot of attention are so-called “product hopping” and “patent thickets.”  At its worst, product hopping involves brand drug makers making minor changes to a drug nearing the end of its patent so that they gets a new patent on the slightly-tweaked drug, and then withdrawing the original drug from the market so that patients shift to the newly patented drug and pharmacists can’t substitute a generic version of the original drug.  Similarly, at their worst, patent thickets involve brand drug makers obtaining a web of patents on a single drug to extend the life of their exclusivity and make it too costly for other drug makers to challenge all of the patents associated with a drug.  The proposed Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act of 2019 is meant to stop these abuses of the patent system, which would facilitate generic entry and help to lower drug prices.

However, the Act goes too far by also capturing many legitimate activities in its definitions. For example, the bill defines as anticompetitive product-hopping the selling of any improved version of a drug during a window which extends to a year after the launch of the first generic competitor.  Presently, to acquire a patent and FDA approval, the improved version of the drug must be different and innovative enough from the original drug, yet the Act would prevent the drug maker from selling such a product without satisfying a demanding three-pronged test before the FTC or a district court.  Similarly, the Act defines as anticompetitive patent thickets any new patents filed on a drug in the same general family as the original patent, and this presumption can only be rebutted by providing extensive evidence and satisfying demanding standards to the FTC or a district court.  As a result, the Act deters innovation activity that is at all related to an initial patent and, in doing so, ignores the fact that most important drug innovation is incremental innovation based on previous inventions.  Thus, the proposal should be redrafted to capture truly anticompetitive product hopping and patent thicket activity, while exempting behavior this is critical for drug innovation. 

Reforms that close loopholes in the current patent process should facilitate competition in the pharmaceutical industry and help to lower drug prices.  However, lawmakers need to be sure that they don’t restrict patent rights to the extent that they deter innovation because a significant body of research predicts that patients’ health outcomes will suffer as a result.

In Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Regulation, Health Care, Intellectual Property, Patent, Pharmaceuticals, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The Hatch-Waxman Integrity Act of 2018—Reestablishing Balance in the Drug Industry

Joanna Shepherd —  17 December 2018

Last week, Senator Orrin Hatch, Senator Thom Tillis, and Representative Bill Flores introduced the Hatch-Waxman Integrity Act of 2018 (HWIA) in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.  If enacted, the HWIA would help to ensure that the unbalanced inter partes review (IPR) process does not stifle innovation in the drug industry and jeopardize patients’ access to life-improving drugs.

Created under the America Invents Act of 2012, IPR is a new administrative pathway for challenging patents. It was, in large part, created to fix the problem of patent trolls in the IT industry; the trolls allegedly used questionable or “low quality” patents to extort profits from innovating companies.  IPR created an expedited pathway to challenge patents of dubious quality, thus making it easier for IT companies to invalidate low quality patents.

However, IPR is available for patents in any industry, not just the IT industry.  In the market for drugs, IPR offers an alternative to the litigation pathway that Congress created over three decades ago in the Hatch-Waxman Act. Although IPR seemingly fixed a problem that threatened innovation in the IT industry, it created a new problem that directly threatened innovation in the drug industry. I’ve previously published an article explaining why IPR jeopardizes drug innovation and consumers’ access to life-improving drugs. With Hatch-Waxman, Congress sought to achieve a delicate balance between stimulating innovation from brand drug companies, who hold patents, and facilitating market entry from generic drug companies, who challenge the patents.  However, IPR disrupts this balance as critical differences between IPR proceedings and Hatch-Waxman litigation clearly tilt the balance in the patent challengers’ favor. In fact, IPR has produced noticeably anti-patent results; patents are twice as likely to be found invalid in IPR challenges as they are in Hatch-Waxman litigation.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) applies a lower standard of proof for invalidity in IPR proceedings than do federal courts in Hatch-Waxman proceedings. In federal court, patents are presumed valid and challengers must prove each patent claim invalid by “clear and convincing evidence.” In IPR proceedings, no such presumption of validity applies and challengers must only prove patent claims invalid by the “preponderance of the evidence.”

Moreover, whereas patent challengers in district court must establish sufficient Article III standing, IPR proceedings do not have a standing requirement.  This has given rise to “reverse patent trolling,” in which entities that are not litigation targets, or even participants in the same industry, threaten to file an IPR petition challenging the validity of a patent unless the patent holder agrees to specific pre-filing settlement demands.  The lack of a standing requirement has also led to the  exploitation of the IPR process by entities that would never be granted standing in traditional patent litigation—hedge funds betting against a company by filing an IPR challenge in hopes of crashing the stock and profiting from the bet.

Finally, patent owners are often forced into duplicative litigation in both IPR proceedings and federal court litigation, leading to persistent uncertainty about the validity of their patents.  Many patent challengers that are unsuccessful in invalidating a patent in district court may pursue subsequent IPR proceedings challenging the same patent, essentially giving patent challengers “two bites at the apple.”  And if the challenger prevails in the IPR proceedings (which is easier to do given the lower standard of proof), the PTAB’s decision to invalidate a patent can often “undo” a prior district court decision.  Further, although both district court judgments and PTAB decisions are appealable to the Federal Circuit, the court applies a more deferential standard of review to PTAB decisions, increasing the likelihood that they will be upheld compared to the district court decision.

The pro-challenger bias in IPR creates significant uncertainty for patent rights in the drug industry.  As an example, just last week patent claims for drugs generating $6.5 billion for drug company Sanofi were invalidated in an IPR proceeding.  Uncertain patent rights will lead to less innovation because drug companies will not spend the billions of dollars it typically costs to bring a new drug to market when they cannot be certain if the patents for that drug can withstand IPR proceedings that are clearly stacked against them.   And, if IPR causes drug innovation to decline, a significant body of research predicts that patients’ health outcomes will suffer as a result.

The HWIA, which applies only to the drug industry, is designed to return the balance established by Hatch-Waxman between branded drug innovators and generic drug challengers. It eliminates challengers’ ability to file duplicative claims in both federal court and through the IPR process. Instead, they must choose between either Hatch-Waxman litigation (which saves considerable costs by allowing generics to rely on the brand company’s safety and efficacy studies for FDA approval) and IPR (which is faster and provides certain pro-challenger provisions). In addition to eliminating generic challengers’ “second bite of the apple,” the HWIA would also eliminate the ability of hedge funds and similar entities to file IPR claims while shorting the stock.

Thus, if enacted, the HWIA would create incentives that reestablish Hatch-Waxman litigation as the standard pathway for generic challenges to brand patents.  Yet, it would preserve IPR proceedings as an option when speed of resolution is a primary concern.  Ultimately, it will restore balance to the drug industry to safeguard competition, innovation, and patients’ access to life-improving drugs.

In Apple, Financial Regulation, Health Care, Intellectual Property, Patent, Pharmaceuticals, Platforms, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Inter Partes Review Jeopardizes the Social Contract between Drug Makers and Patients

Joanna Shepherd —  22 October 2017

It’s been six weeks since drug maker Allergan announced that it had assigned to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe the patents on Restasis, an Allergan drug challenged both in IPR proceedings and in Hatch-Waxman proceedings in federal district court.  The unorthodox agreement was intended to shield the patents from IPR proceedings (and thus restrict the challenge to district court) as the Mohawks would seek to dismiss the IPR proceedings based on the tribe’s sovereign immunity.  Although Allergan  suffered a setback last week when the federal court invalidated the Restasis patents and, in dicta, expressed concern about the Allergan/Mohawk arrangement, several other entities are following Allergan’s lead and assigning patents to sovereigns in hopes of avoiding IPR proceedings.

As an example, in August, SRC Labs assigned about 40 computer technology patents to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe.  Last week, the tribe, with SRC as co-plaintiff, filed lawsuits against Microsoft and Amazon for infringement of its data processing patents; the assignment of the SRC patents to the tribe could prevent a counter-challenge from Microsoft and Amazon in IPR proceedings.  Similarly, Prowire LLC, who has sued Apple for infringement, has assigned the patent in question to MEC Resources, a company affiliated with three tribes in North Dakota.  And state universities (whom the PTAB considers to be arms of the sovereign states, and thus immune to IPR challenges) are in discussions with lawyers about offering their sovereign immunity to patent owners as a way to shield patents in IPR proceedings.

These arrangements that attempt to avoid the IPR process and force patent challenges into federal courts are no surprise given the current unbalance in the IPR system.  Critical differences exist between IPR proceedings and Hatch-Waxman litigation that have created a significant deviation in patent invalidation rates under the two pathways; compared to district court challenges, patents are twice as likely to be found invalid in IPR challenges.

The PTAB applies a lower standard of proof for invalidity in IPR proceedings than do federal courts in Hatch-Waxman proceedings. In federal court, patents are presumed valid and challengers must prove each patent claim invalid by “clear and convincing evidence.” In IPR proceedings, no such presumption of validity applies and challengers must only prove patent claims invalid by the “preponderance of the evidence.” In addition to the lower burden, it is also easier for challengers to meet the standard of proof in IPR proceedings.  In federal court, patent claims are construed according to their “ordinary and customary meaning” to a person of ordinary skill in the art.  In contrast, the PTAB uses the more lenient “broadest reasonable interpretation” standard; this more lenient standard can result in the PTAB interpreting patent claims as “claiming too much” (using their broader standard), resulting in the invalidation of more patents.

Moreover, whereas patent challengers in district court must establish sufficient Article III standing, IPR proceedings do not have a standing requirement.  This has given rise to “reverse patent trolling,” in which entities that are not litigation targets, or even participants in the same industry, threaten to file an IPR petition challenging the validity of a patent unless the patent holder agrees to specific pre-filing settlement demands.  The lack of a standing requirement has also led to the  exploitation of the IPR process by entities that would never be granted standing in traditional patent litigation—hedge funds betting against a company by filing an IPR challenge in hopes of crashing the stock and profiting from the bet.

Finally, patent owners are often forced into duplicative litigation in both IPR proceedings and federal court litigation, leading to persistent uncertainty about the validity of their patents.  Many patent challengers that are unsuccessful in invalidating a patent in district court may pursue subsequent IPR proceedings challenging the same patent, essentially giving patent challengers “two bites at the apple.”  And if the challenger prevails in the IPR proceedings (which is easier to do given the lower standard of proof and broader claim construction standard), the PTAB’s decision to invalidate a patent can often “undo” a prior district court decision.  Further, although both district court judgments and PTAB decisions are appealable to the Federal Circuit, the court applies a more deferential standard of review to PTAB decisions, increasing the likelihood that they will be upheld compared to the district court decision.

Courts are increasingly recognizing that certain PTAB practices are biased against patent owners, and, in some cases, violations of underlying law.  The U.S. Supreme Court in Cuozzo Speed Technologies v. Lee concluded that the broadest reasonable interpretation claim construction standard in IPR “increases the possibility that the examiner will find the claim too broad (and deny it)” and that the different claim construction standards in PTAB trials and federal court “may produce inconsistent results and cause added confusion.”  However, the Court concluded that only Congress could mandate a different standard.  Earlier this month, in Aqua Products, Inc. v. Matal, the Federal Circuit held that “[d]espite repeated recognition of the importance of the patent owner’s right to amend [patent claims] during IPR proceedings— by Congress, courts, and the PTO alike—patent owners largely have been prevented from amending claims in the context of IPRs.”   And the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group, which questions whether IPR proceedings are even constitutional because they extinguish private property rights through a non-Article III forum without a jury. 

As Courts and lawmakers continue to question the legality and wisdom of IPR to review pharmaceutical patents, they should remember that the relationship between drug companies and patients resembles a social contract. Under this social contract, patients have the right to reasonably-priced, innovative drugs and sufficient access to alternative drug choices, while drug companies have the right to earn profits that compensate for the risk inherent in developing new products and to a stable environment that gives the companies the incentive and ability to innovate.  This social contract requires a balancing of prices (not too high to gouge consumers but not too low to insufficiently compensate drug companies), competition law (not so lenient that it ignores anticompetitive behavior that restricts patients’ access to alternative drugs, but not so strict that it prevents companies from intensely competing for profits), and most importantly in the context of IPR, patent law (not so weak that it fails to incentivize innovation and drug development, but not so strong that it enables drug companies to monopolize the market for an unreasonable amount of time).  The unbalanced IPR process threatens this balance by creating significant uncertainty in pharmaceutical intellectual property rights.  Uncertain patent rights will lead to less innovation in the pharmaceutical industry because drug companies will not spend the billions of dollars it typically costs to bring a new drug to market when they cannot be certain if the patents for that drug can withstand IPR proceedings that are clearly stacked against them.  Indeed, last week former Federal Circuit Chief Judge Paul Redmond Michel acknowledged that IPR has contributed to “hobbling” our nation’s patent system, “discourag[ing] investment, R&D and commercialization.” And if IPR causes drug innovation to decline, a significant body of research predicts that consumers’ health outcomes will suffer as a result.

In Amazon, Apple, COVID-19, Financial Regulation, Health Care, Intellectual Property, Patent, Pharmaceuticals, Platforms, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , ,
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The Allergan-Mohawk deal: An ingenious strategy to avoid an unbalanced IPR process

Joanna Shepherd —  14 September 2017

Last Friday, drug maker Allergan and the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe announced that they had reached an agreement under which Allergan assigned the patents on its top-selling drug Restasis to the tribe and, in return, Allergan was given the exclusive license on the Restasis patents so that it can continue producing and distributing the drug.  Allergan agreed to pay $13.75 million to the tribe for the deal, and up to $15 million annually in royalties as long as the patents remain valid.

Why would a large drug maker assign the patents on a leading drug to a sovereign Indian nation?  This unorthodox agreement may actually be a brilliant strategy that enables patent owners to avoid the unbalanced inter partes review (IPR) process.  The validity of the Restasis patents is currently being challenged both in IPR proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and in federal district court in Texas.  However, the Allergan-Mohawk deal may lead to the dismissal of the IPR proceedings as, under the terms of the deal, the Mohawks will file a motion to dismiss the IPR proceedings based on the tribe’s sovereign immunity.  Earlier this year, in Covidien v. University of Florida Research Foundation, the PTAB determined that sovereign immunity shields state universities holding patents from IPR proceedings, and the same reasoning should certainly apply to sovereign Indian nations.

I’ve published a previous article explaining why pharmaceutical companies have legitimate reasons to avoid IPR proceedings–critical differences between district court litigation and IPR proceedings jeopardize the delicate balance Hatch-Waxman sought to achieve between patent owners and patent challengers. In addition to forcing patent owners into duplicative litigation in district courts and the PTAB, depriving them of the ability to achieve finality in one proceeding, the PTAB also applies a lower standard of proof for invalidity than do district courts in Hatch-Waxman litigation.  It is also easier to meet the standard of proof in a PTAB trial because of a more lenient claim construction standard.  Moreover, on appeal, PTAB decisions in IPR proceedings are given more deference than lower district court decisions.  Finally, while patent challengers in district court must establish sufficient Article III standing, IPR proceedings do not have a standing requirement.  This has led to the exploitation of the IPR process by entities that would never be granted standing in traditional patent litigation—hedge funds betting against a company by filing an IPR challenge in hopes of crashing the stock and profiting from the bet.

The differences between district court litigation and IPR proceedings have created a significant deviation in patent invalidation rates under the two pathways; compared to district court challenges, patents are twice as likely to be found invalid in IPR challenges.  Although the U.S. Supreme Court in Cuozzo Speed Technologies v. Lee concluded that the anti-patentee claim construction standard in IPR “increases the possibility that the examiner will find the claim too broad (and deny it)”, the Court concluded that only Congress could mandate a different standard.  So far, Congress has done nothing to reduce the disparities between IPR proceedings and Hatch-Waxman litigation. But, while we wait, the high patent invalidation rate in IPR proceedings creates significant uncertainty for patent owners’ intellectual property rights.   Uncertain patent rights, in turn, lead to less innovation in the pharmaceutical industry.  Put simply, drug companies will not spend the billions of dollars it typically costs to bring a new drug to market when they can’t be certain if the patents for that drug can withstand IPR proceedings that are clearly stacked against them (for an excellent discussion of how the PTAB threatens innovation, see Alden Abbot’s recent TOTM post).  Thus, deals between brand companies and sovereigns, such as Indian nations, that insulate patents from IPR proceedings should improve the certainty around intellectual property rights and protect drug innovation.

Yet, the response to the Allergan-Mohawk deal among some scholars and generic drug companies has been one of panic and speculative doom.  Critics have questioned the deal largely on the grounds that, in addition to insulating Restasis from IPR proceedings, tribal sovereignty might also shield the patents in standard Hatch-Waxman district court litigation.  If this were true and brand companies began to routinely house their patents with sovereign Indian nations, then the venues in which generic companies could challenge patents would be restricted and generic companies would have less incentive to produce and market cheaper drugs.

However, it is far from clear that these deals could shield patents in standard Hatch-Waxman district court litigation.  Hatch-Waxman litigation typically follows a familiar pattern: a generic company files a Paragraph IV ANDA alleging patent owner’s patents are invalid or will not be infringed, the patent owner then sues the generic for infringement, and then the generic company files a counterclaim for invalidity.  Critics of the Allergan-Mohawk deal allege that tribal sovereignty could insulate patent owners from the counterclaim.  However, courts have held that state universities waive sovereign immunity for counterclaims when they file the initial patent infringement suit.  Although, in non-infringement contexts, tribes have been found to not waive sovereign immunity for counterclaims merely by filing an action as a plaintiff, this has never been tested in patent litigation.  Moreover, even if sovereign immunity could be used to prevent the counterclaim, invalidity can still be raised as an affirmative defense in the patent owner’s infringement suit (although it has been asserted that requiring generics to assert invalidity as an affirmative defense instead of a counterclaim may still tilt the playing field toward patent owners).  Finally, many patent owners that are sovereigns may choose to voluntarily waive sovereign immunity to head off any criticism or congressional meddling. Given the uncertainty of the effects of tribal sovereignty in Hatch-Waxman litigation, Allergan has concluded that their deal with the Mohawks won’t affect the pending district court litigation involving the validity of the Restasis patents.  However, if tribes in future cases were to cloud the viability of Hatch-Waxman by asserting sovereign immunity in district court litigation, Congress could always respond by altering the Hatch-Waxman rules to preclude this.

For now, we should all take a deep breath and put the fearmongering on hold.  Whether deals like the Allergan-Mohawk arrangement could affect Hatch-Waxman litigation is simply a matter of speculation, and there are many reasons to believe that they won’t. In the meantime, the deal between Allergan and the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe is an ingenious strategy to avoid the unbalanced IPR process.   This move is the natural extension of the PTAB’s ruling on state university sovereign immunity, and state universities are likely incorporating the advantage into their own licensing and litigation strategies.  The Supreme Court will soon hear a case questioning the constitutionality of the IPR process.  Until the courts or Congress act to reduce the disparities between IPR proceedings and Hatch-Waxman litigation, we can hardly blame patent owners from taking clever legal steps to avoid the unbalanced IPR process.

In Constitutional Law, COVID-19, Financial Regulation, Health Care, Intellectual Property, Patent, Pharmaceuticals, Platforms, Truth on the Market, Twitter , , , , , , , ,
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Larry Ribstein’s Top Posts of 2011

Josh Wright —  1 January 2012

Happy New Year TOTM readers.  I’ve had a very difficult time returning to blogging.  Monday mornings I would normally wake up to a string of four or five of Larry’s posts already up and attracting comments.   He had a way of making one feel incredibly inefficient and unproductive by comparison!  Of course, there was never any real comparison to Larry’s production.  But it was incredibly motivating nonetheless.  I miss him terribly.

We will continue to collect your remembrances of Larry on the Memoriam tab above.  Please keep them coming.

Below, I’ve collected links to 11 of Larry’s most popular posts of 2011.  Enjoy.

In Constitutional Law, Financial Regulation, First Amendment, Truth on the Market ,
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Poets vs. capitalists

Larry Ribstein —  17 December 2011

Eric Felten writing in yesterday’s WSJ, observes the hypocrisy of the poets who withdrew from competition for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize because it was funded by a financial firm. “Hedge funds are at the very pointy end of capitalism” sniffed one self-described “anti-capitalist in full-on form.” The anarchist vegan correctly observed that the funder’s business “does not sit with my personal politics and ethics.”

Felten notes that modern winners of a poetry prize do not “expect the florid lickspittlery once lavished on those who provided artists their livings.” He also calls out the hypocrisy of a poet who turned down a hedge funded prize but wasn’t too shy to acknowledge the support of

the ‘Arts for Everyone’ budget of the Arts Council of England’s Lottery Department. Which is to say, she’s happy to bank the cash culled from the easy marks who pay the stupidity tax, but not the earnings of a mainstream investment firm. * * * So let’s get this straight: If the investment bankers’ money is grudgingly handed over to the taxman it’s squeaky clean. But if it is given voluntarily, the lucre is filthy. What an odd and upside-down moral equation.

But Felten shouldn’t have focused all of his ire on poets.  I have written about American filmmakers who similarly find a lot to dislike in the capitalists who support their work but have little problem with government.

In Financial Regulation ,
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The EU and jurisdictional competition for hedge fund regulation

Larry Ribstein —  11 December 2011

The NYT reports:

When he rejected a new European accord on Friday that would bind the continent ever closer, Prime Minister David Cameron seemingly sacrificed Britain’s place in Europe to preserve the pre-eminence of the City, London’s financial district. The question now is whether his stance will someday seem justified, even prescient.

Mr. Cameron refused to go along with the new European plan of stricter fiscal oversight and discipline hammered out in Brussels this week, in great part because of fears that the City would be strangled by regulations emanating from Brussels. * * *

But will it matter?  The article points out that:

  • Non-British banks in the UK will still be subject to EU regulation.
  • European activity might be redirected from the UK to Frankfurt.
  • Europe could prohibit its banks from dealing with UK firms that didn’t adhere to EU regulation.
  • But the UK could exit the EU, reducing the impact of EU regulation in the UK.
  • European banks would still have a powerful incentive to remain global by competing in the UK market. 
  • Even if excluded from Europe, UK banks would still compete powerfully for U.S. and Asian business.  The UK didn’t lose its edge when it stayed with the pound, and likely won’t if it opts out of EU regulation.

And of course there’s the question whether UK hedge funds and other financial institutions will be better global competitors without being saddled by more intrusive European regulation.

Cameron’s move is a reminder that the EU has a double edge:  it promotes competition within the EU, but erects a regulatory cartel for the EU against the rest of the world.  With or without the cartel, it’s still a global economy, governed by the powerful forces of jurisdictional competition.  Federal cartels can slow down that completion but not stop it.

It’s a lesson worth remembering for U.S. securities regulators.

In European Union, Financial Regulation, International, Jurisdictional Competition, Regulation, United Kingdom
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The uncorporate approach to poor earnings

Larry Ribstein —  25 October 2011

Yesterday’s WSJ reported that hedge funds are facing possible investor redemption demands:

As the year comes to a close, some investors say they are reviewing how their managers have performed through the recent volatility and are making decisions about whether to cash out of underperforming funds. Investors who want out before the end of the year in most cases need to give 45 or 60 days’ notice of their redemptions, setting up a critical period for managers who have suffered significant losses. * * *

Those funds’ managers “will be punished, and rightfully so,” said Vidak Radonjic of the Beryl Consulting Group LLC, which advises investors on hedge funds. * * *

“If they are having a bad year in that returns are down but can explain it in a way that convinces us they haven’t lost their discipline, then we might give them a pass,” said Sam Katzman, the chief investment officer of Constellation Wealth Advisors, which invests in hedge funds and has $4.5 billion under management. Constellation is likely to redeem from some managers who have underperformed this year, he said.

It might be a good idea if poorly performing corporations faced the same discipline. One might argue that it beats the vagaries and gaps in the business judgment rule and shareholder voting.

In fact, one did.

In Corporate & Securities Law, Financial Regulation ,
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2011 Illinois Corporate Colloquium: Shadab on credit risk transfer

Larry Ribstein —  8 September 2011

The 2011 Illinois Corporate Colloquium got off to a good start with Houman Shadab presenting his paper, The Good, the Bad, and the Savvy: Credit Risk Transfer Governance.  Here’s the abstract:

Goldman Sachs and AIG on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis were bound together through a web of credit risk transfer (CRT) contracts in the form of credit default swaps (CDSs) and synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Synthetic CDOs enabled hedge funds to profit from the ultimate bursting of the housing bubble due to the funds’ savvy in understanding CRT better than their counterparties. This Article constructs a novel theory of CRT that extends the insights of creditor governance theory to CRT transactions. Creditor governance theory has thus far has been primarily limited to analyzing loans and bonds and not CRT instruments.

Good CRT governance can protect investors (and counterparties) from losses even if the underlying assets whose credit risk is transferred experience significant losses. Bad CRT governance, by contrast, creates transaction structures that leave parties with highly sensitive exposures to losses in underlying credit instruments. I argue that for unfunded CRT transactions such as CDSs, good governance can be achieved through counterparty governance mechanisms consisting of bilateral monitoring, collateralization, and a robust market infrastructure even without the use of covenants, central clearinghouses, or swap execution facilities. Likewise, good governance for funded CRT transactions such as CDOs can be achieved through special purpose vehicle (SPV) governance mechanisms consisting of strong monitoring, substantial ex ante specification of creditors’ rights, performance-based covenants, and active SPV management even with a weak market infrastructure and without risk retention by the issuer or manager.

In practice, most types of CRT transactions are well governed despite being subject to relatively little government regulation and oversight. This explains why the CDS market remained generally stable throughout the financial crisis and securitizations that transferred the credit risk of assets other than subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), such as collateralized loan obligations and commercial mortgage-backed securities, performed relatively well and were not a source of systemic risk. Accordingly, this Article challenges much of the conventional and scholarly wisdom regarding CRT, which overemphasizes a lack of regulation as a primary cause of losses and systemic risk from CRT transactions. To the contrary, the financial crisis of 2008 is best understood as resulting from poor CRT governance. The only transactions underlying the financial crisis were cash CDOs and unfunded super senior tranches of synthetic CDOs whose prices failed to reflect that they were poorly governed yet nonetheless transferring massive credit risk in the form of subprime RMBS.

Policymaking initiatives should thus narrowly target the uniquely bad governance of subprime residential mortgage-related CRT, but not the CDS or securitization markets more broadly. This Article concludes by identifying several implications of CRT governance for financial regulators implementing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. An important implication of CRT governance is that additional regulation may increase the risk of CRT transactions.

The paper’s main contribution is to extend the “creditor governance” literature to the alphabet soup of credit risk transfer instruments. Well-governed instruments benefit society, poorly governed instruments don’t. The “savvy,” including the likes of John Paulson, can make money from correctly recognizing risks ahead of the rest of the market.

This approach somewhat simplifies analysis of the financial crash by reducing it to a governance problem.  But as we discussed in the Colloquium, this raises another question:  why were RMBS’s poorly governed while collateralized loan obligations and commercial mortgage-backed securities were not?  More precisely, why did the market effectively discipline some types of instruments and not others?  We need to answer this question to effectively regulate future transactions.

The obvious answer would seem to be that the market was able to price some risks better than others.  But why is that?

Houman suggests that the reason may be that the real risk in RMBS’s was in a second tier of securities that were hidden from investors’ immediate view.  I was skeptical of that explanation for two reasons.  First, since investors knew about the existence of the second level, it would seem their ignorance would be priced.

A second reason for skepticism is Bobby Bartlett’s presentation to last year’s colloquium:  Inefficiencies in the Information Thicket: A Case Study of Derivative Disclosures During the Financial Crisis.  Bartlett shows that the market did not appropriately discount disclosed risks of RMBS’s. He concludes by noting:

Reform efforts aimed at enhancing derivative disclosures should accordingly focus on mechanisms to promote the rapid collection and compilation of disclosed information as well as the psychological processes by which information obtains salience.

What specific reform efforts might we consider?  When I concluded the discussion with that question, Houman responded that investors may have over-relied on the credit rating services.  This suggests we should eliminate the official status of credit ratings in financial regulation — something that Dodd-Frank did.  It will be interesting to test whether this has the desired effect.

So maybe Dodd-Frank did do some good.  Of course it also did a lot of other things.

In all, an interesting and timely discussion in the tradition of the CoIloquium to present theoretical perspectives on corporate governance that are both engaging for faculty and useful for students. (And, yes, I think this combination is possible).   I’m looking forward to more great talks this semester, as in prior semesters (see the Colloquium link above for speaker lists).  I hope to get time to blog on most of them.

Update:  Houman’s blog, “Lawbitrage,” notes that the RMBS market apparently has learned from the past.  This reminds us that even if markets don’t always operate perfectly, they at least have the capacity to adjust to mistakes.  Compare government.

In Financial Regulation ,
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Where have all the lawyers gone: working for hedge funds every one

Larry Ribstein —  13 June 2011

Dan Fisher discusses how Ecuadorean villagers financed a pollution lawsuit against Chevron with money from a hedge fund, Burford Group. 

This is yet another example of how lawyers are capitalizing and packaging their skills rather than just selling it by the hour to clients. Fisher discusses how the plaintiffs’ lawyer had gone through $6 million in financing from another lawyer when that deal blew up, sending the lawyer to a Cayman Islands firm associated with Burford. As Fisher notes, Burford is

a publicly traded company that specializes in financing corporate litigation. Burford is run by experienced corporate attorneys with blue-chip resumes — the chief executive Chris Bogart, is the former general counsel of Time Warner and directors include Geoffrey Hazard of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, considered the dean of U.S. legal ethics and civil procedure.

Plaintiffs get “up to $15 million” in financing.  Burford gets 5.545% if the suit settles for a billion, and $55.5 million (less some payouts the original financier and other lawyers) before the villagers get anything.  The client makes the final call on settlement, as the law requires, but the financier makes sure the villagers have a financial incentive not to give the lawsuit away. And the agreement has other agency cost controls:  the client must cooperate with Burford’s lawyers, and, according to Fisher, “a lawyer from Patton Boggs, a Washington law firm with close ties to Burford, must remain in charge of the cash.”

Fisher has some interesting analysis of the agreement.  He also discusses the controversy over litigation finance, and how common it is, from lawyer contingency fees to insurers taking over lawsuits after they’ve paid the claims.  

My main interest here is not the contract or the controversy but seeing lawyers (or as I prefer to call them, legal information experts) all over the place.  Not just in court, but as the original financier, then working for the hedge fund to analyze the case, then watching over the hedge fund’s agreement with the client.

This sort of thing is what’s going to pick up the slack in the legal market after the Death of Big Law.

Update:  See also Roger Parloff’s “Have you got a piece of this lawsuit” in the (June 13) Fortune, p. 69.  This article focuses on the problems of litigation funding illustrated by this case.  Again, not my focus in this post.

In Financial Regulation, Legal Profession , ,
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