Excessive and useless reporting, called “crying wolf effect”, is a crucial shortcoming that any anti-money laundering (AML) design aims to address and fix. For this reason, in these years the AML policy has switched both in the US and in Europe from a rule- to a risk-based approach. This...

Money laundering has become a phenomenon of financial market regulation. The obligation to identify the ultimate beneficiary, or the beneficiary owner, which need not be entirely synonymous terms, has been the focus for both national authorities and international organizations. However, such...

During the last decade, anti-money laundering regulation has escalated within the EU. The goal of this paper is to analyse the extent of the introduced criminal liability for legal persons related to money laundering offences by the sixth EU anti-money laundering directive. The focus of this...

When Congress passed the National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996 (NSMIA), it unilaterally withdrew the preexisting power of the states to require pre-sale registration disclosures by issuers, including the power to conduct pre-sale disclosure review, merit review, or any other kind...

Congress, urged by the states to fill the “gap” left by their existing regulatory schemes for local securities markets, passed the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Since the enactment of federal legislation, investors in securities have been protected by a dual...

State regulators utilize merit review to protect investors, issuers, and the marketplace by focusing on the substantive quality of securities offerings. In this article, the author addresses the evolution of the dual regulatory system and the resulting roles of the state and federal securities...

Corporate governance scandals inevitably raise concerns about the extent to which corporate directors failed in their responsibility to monitor the corporation and its managers, especially in terms of the latter's' misdeeds. Corporate governance reforms strive to shore up directors' roles by...

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) has raised the stakes for financial regulation by requiring more than twenty federal agencies to promulgate nearly 400 new rules. Scholars, regulated entities, Congress, courts, and the agencies themselves have all...

The hedge fund industry in the United States evolved from a niche market participant in the early 1950s to a major industry operating in international financial markets. Hedge funds in the United States were originally privately-held, privately-managed investment funds, unregistered and exempt...

The Australian Treasury has identified a number of challenges in FinTech, especially around Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). In this paper we examine four types of tokens within ICOs: pure utility tokens, security tokens, stored value tokens, and hybrid tokens. There is considerable confusion...