Policing the City – where do in-house lawyers fit in?

Posted on | Comment |

Stephenson Harwood’s Tony Woodcock argues that financial regulation has failed to clarify the status of in-house counsel Though one is always on dangerous ground in suggesting that anything was clear or uncomplicated in the Financial Services Authority’s Handbook and its successors, one could comfortably say that in-house lawyers were not regarded as significant influence function-holders …

Continue reading “Policing the City – where do in-house lawyers fit in?”

Coming off the naughty step

Posted on | Comment |

Baker & McKenzie’s Jonathan Walsh charts the quiet rehabilitation of asset-backed lending Securitisation has taken a battering in recent years. A complex financing technique, little understood by the public, it was an easy scapegoat as a principal cause of the global financial crisis. For a while after the crisis it seemed as if various supervisory …

Continue reading “Coming off the naughty step”

‘A curious atmosphere of consensus’ – the dangers of groupthink

Posted on | Comment |

HSF fraud veteran Robert Hunter on how smart teams can make bad decisions Many admire John Kennedy and his advisers’ deft handling of the Cuban missile crisis. It is generally thought to result from some of the best-judged decisions of the era. Yet a year earlier, much the same group of people decided to support …

Continue reading “‘A curious atmosphere of consensus’ – the dangers of groupthink”

Guest post: Why ‘Big Ideas’ are often wrong and the fallacies of legal myths

Posted on | Blogs |

Why do ‘big ideas’ or ‘monolithic ideas’ become so accepted when under analysis and the test of time they so often prove to be wrong? It has always seemed especially strange for monolithic thinking to have caught on in the legal sector, an industry whose lifeblood is enthused with the need for careful checking of …

Continue reading “Guest post: Why ‘Big Ideas’ are often wrong and the fallacies of legal myths”

Guest post: Why the right is losing the argument on tax – and why it matters to all of us

Posted on | Blogs |

Two weeks ago, Labour pledged to tax as income the performance fees (known as the ‘carried interest’) paid to certain investment managers. This rather than the much lower capital gains tax rate enjoyed hitherto. The pledge followed Labour’s promise, earlier in the week, to remove the centuries old non-dom tax break and, last month, to …

Continue reading “Guest post: Why the right is losing the argument on tax – and why it matters to all of us”

Guest post: The Conservative Party manifesto and human rights

Posted on | Blogs |

The Conservative Party manifesto states that the terms of British EU membership will be renegotiated and an in/out referendum held. The Human Rights Act will be ‘scrapped’ and replaced by a British Bill of Rights. As for legal aid, the document merely informs us that they would continue to review our legal aid systems, so …

Continue reading “Guest post: The Conservative Party manifesto and human rights”

Guest post: Ed can enter No. 10 without Nicola’s keys

Posted on | Blogs |

This election looks a close-run thing – very close run indeed. As I write, polls and forecasts suggest strongly that no party’s going to get near a majority. There’s a lot of talk about what could happen after May 7th. And an idea’s beginning to take hold that, in a hung Parliament, Ed Miliband would …

Continue reading “Guest post: Ed can enter No. 10 without Nicola’s keys”

Simpson Thacher’s Glover: Tied up and tied down – a peculiar way to police the private funds market

Posted on | Blogs |

The financial crisis ushered a wave of new regulations aimed at mitigating systemic risk to the financial system. While no-one has been able to rationally point a finger at private funds as a cause of the crisis, the industry has nonetheless seen a dramatic rise in the level of regulation and scrutiny. As legal and …

Continue reading “Simpson Thacher’s Glover: Tied up and tied down – a peculiar way to police the private funds market”