Stock Market Manipulation and Its Regulation Merritt .B Fox Columbia University Law School
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
University of Michigan Law School University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository Articles Faculty Scholarship 2018 Stock Market Manipulation and Its Regulation Merritt .B Fox Columbia University Law School Lawrence R. Glosten Columbia University Business School Gabriel Rauterberg University of Michigan Law School, [email protected] Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/1978 Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles Part of the Law and Economics Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, and the Securities Law Commons Recommended Citation Fox, Merritt .,B co-author. "Stock Market Manipulation and Its Regulation."L. R. Glosten and G. V. Rauterberg, co-authors. Yale J. Reg. 35, no. 1 (2018): 67-126. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Stock Market Manipulation and Its Regulation Merritt B. Fox,t Lawrence R. Glosten, and Gabriel V. Rauterberg More than eighty years after federal law first addressed stock market manipulation, federal courts remain fractured by disagreement and confusion about manipulation law's most foundational questions. Only last year, plaintiffs petitioned the Supreme Court to resolve a sharp split among the federal circuits concerning manipulation law's central question: whether trading activity alone can ever be considered illegal manipulation under federal law. Academics have been similarly confused economists and legal scholars cannot agree on whether manipulation is possible in principle; let alone on how, if it is, to address it properly in practice. This Article offers an analytical framework for understanding manipulation, which resolves these questions, clarifies federal law, and can guide regulators in successfully prosecutingfinancial law's most intractable wrong. We draw on the tools of microstructureeconomics and the theory of the firm to provide a synthesis of the various distinct forms of manipulation, identify who is harmed by each form, and evaluate their social welfare effects. This Article thus lays the foundation for a renewed understanding of manipulation and its place within securities regulation. I. Overview ....................................... ............. 74 A. Types of Manipulation ................................. 74 1. Naked Open Market Manipulation ........................ 74 2. Open Market Manipulation with an External Interest ........... 75 3. Misstatement Manipulation ............ .............. 75 B. The Role ofPurpose. ......................... .......... 76 C. The Extent and Nature of Manipulation ...................... 77 II. The Normative Framework ............................ 80 A. Social Goals .......................................... 80 B. The Use ofEx Post and Ex Ante Analysis................... 81 C. Market Characteristicsthat Impact on These Goals ........... 82 t Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law, NASDAQ Professor of the Law and Economics of Capital Markets, Columbia Law School. S. Sloan Colt Professor of Banking and International Finance, Columbia Business School. * Assistant Professor of Law, Michigan Law School. For particularly helpful comments, we are grateful to Michael Barr Michael Guttentag, Elizabeth Pollman, Jennifer Rothman, Andrew Verstein, Yesha Yedav, and participants at faculty workshops at Columbia Law School, Loyola Law School, and Oxford University. 67 Yale Journal on Regulation Vol. 35, 2018 1. Price Accuracy .......................... ......... 83 2. Liquidity .......................................... 84 III. The Workings of the Equity Market ...................... 86 A. Market Participantsand Their Reasons for Trading........... 86 1. Informed Traders .................................... 86 2. Uninformed Traders...............................87 3. Noise Traders .......................... .......... 88 4. Anti-noise Traders ................................. 88 5. Professional Liquidity Suppliers ............. .......... 89 B. Trading Venues and Orders.. ............................. 89 C. The Economics ofLiquidity Provision..................... 90 1. The Liquidity Supply Business .............................. 90 2. Transacting with Informed Versus Uninformed Traders...........90 3. How Liquidity Suppliers Set Their Bids and Offers......... 91 4. The Pattern of Transaction Prices in the Presence of Informed Trading ................................. 92 IV. Naked Open Market Manipulation ....................... 93 A. Wealth Transfers: Fairnessand Efficiency........... ....... 94 1. Ex post Perspective ................................ 94 2. Ex ante Perspective ................................ 97 3. Fairness Considerations ................... ......... 100 4. Efficiency Considerations ................... ....... 101 B. Are There Expected Profits? ................... ..... ... 103 1. The Fischel and Ross Arguments as to Why Profitable Manipulation Is Impossible ................... ...... 103 2. Can an Asymmetric Price Response Ever Be Anticipated ...... 104 C. The Appropriateness ofLegal Sanctions............ ....... 106 V. Open Market Manipulation with an External Interest ....... ...... 107 A. The Example of United States v. Mulheren ............ ..... 108 B. Wealth Transfers: Their Fairnessand the Efficiency Effects of Their Incentives ............................... ...... 109 C. The Appropriateness ofImposing Legal Sanctions..............111 VI. Misstatement Manipulation ......................... ........... 111 A. Misstatement Manipulation as a Kind ofInformed Trading..........112 B. Wealth Transfers: Their Fairnessand the Efficiency Implications of the Incentives Created.....................112 C. The Appropriateness ofLegal Sanctions............ ....... 113 VII. The Law of Securities Manipulation ................... ..... 114 A. Open Market Manipulation. ............................ 114 1. Section 9(a) ............................... ...... 114 2. Section 10(b) .......................... ........... 118 B. Assessing the Law on Open Market Manipulation...... ...... 122 C. Misstatement Manipulation. ............................ 123 Conclusion ...................................... ...... ... 125 68 Stock Market Manipulation and Its Regulation Introduction More than eighty years after federal law first addressed stock market manipulation, the federal courts remain fractured by disagreement and confusion concerning manipulation law's most foundational issues. There remains, for example, a sharp split among the federal circuits concerning manipulation law's central question: Whether trading activity alone can ever be considered illegal manipulation under federal law?2 Academics have been similarly confused-economists and legal scholars cannot agree on whether manipulation is even possible in principle, let alone on how to properly address it in practice.-3 This confusion is particularly striking because preventing manipulation was a primary motivation for enacting the U.S. securities laws. In the midst of the Great Depression, manipulation struck Congress and varied commentators as a principal cause of the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing economic collapse.4 As a result, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the "Exchange Act") expressly prohibits manipulation in its Sections 9 and 10(b). 5 The continued confusion is also striking because if one uses the rough proxy of SEC enforcement, the problem of manipulation is of a similar scale to insider trading. In its statistics for the last five years, the SEC reported bringing a combined 237 civil and administrative enforcement actions for insider trading and 229 for market manipulation.6 Yet, while there is a vast legal and economic literature addressing insider trading, efforts to analyze manipulation have been far more limited. The difficulties for manipulation law begin with the statutory provisions themselves. The Exchange Act gives remarkably little guidance as to the 1. See infra Section VII.A (discussing splits among the federal circuit courts of appeal). 2. See infra note 142 and accompanying text (discussing a manipulation petition to the Supreme Court). 3. The literature on manipulation features a chorus of commentators arguing about the definition and usefulness of the concept of manipulation. See, e.g., Daniel R. Fischel & David Ross, Should the Law Prohibit "Manipulation" in Financial Markets?, 105 HARV. L. REV. 503 (1991) (famously arguing that the concept of manipulation should be abandoned); Craig Pirrong, Squeezes, Corpses, and the Anti-Manipulation Provisionsof the Commodity Exchange Act, 17 REG., no. 4, 1994 at 54 ("[T]o define just what manipulation means .... is a more difficult task than one might think, because the term 'manipulation' is used very imprecisely and indiscriminately."). 4. See, e.g., Fischel & Ross, supra note 3, at 503 ("The drafters of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 ... were convinced that there was a direct link between excessive speculation, the stock market crash of 1929, and the Great Depression of the 1930s."); William A. Roach, Jr., Hedge Fund Regulation: "What Side of the Hedges Are You on?", 40 U. MEM. L. REV. 165, 178 (2009) ("The shocking results of the [congressional] investigation uncovered high levels of market manipulation