@agranato42.bsky.social
Legal economist; incoming Assistant Professor of Law, UT Austin. "We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price - so that we may survive." Site: https://sites.google.com/view/andrewgranato/
Tax Notes has discovered that Jeffrey Epstein created several Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts after he was indicted in 2006. My read: the premiums contributed suggest that Epstein was probably not using them for the income tax exemption, but quite possibly for asset protection.
Having a chuckle that this article has the high ratio of downloads to abstract views of any article I've ever seen. What the people want! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below
When I worked at the Chicago Fed, we became interested in a unique quirk of insurance accounting: states can issue insurers "permitted practice" accounting exceptions. They're relatively uncommon but acan occasionally be quite significant. Our writeup is out: link.springer.com/epdf/10.1057...
Hey that’s about the cost of the SSI Restoration Act, which would cut recipient poverty by 60%, eliminate marriage penalties, and modernize draconian asset limits.
I'm also thinking about: banks, worker-owned firms, insurers, rate-regulated public entities, REITs, MLPs, B corps & L3Cs, nonprofit-controlled corps, SOEs, GSEs, sovereign wealth funds, special purpose governments, merchant ships, but this I thought was the most spectacular
I love it! If other people know of off-the-wall cases like this where we're truly a world away from "shareholders are residual claimants"-land, I would love to hear about them.
As part of preparing to teach my first seminar, I've been going through literature on business entities whose governance logics are structurally different than Fortune 500-style Berle & Means corporations (funds, consumer co-ops, etc.), and then I found this: repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol116/i...
There's one non-public-utility market in America where it is routine for legislators, including in deep-red states, to endorse price controls, and no one has a problem with it! www.wsj.com/finance/regu...
Meanwhile, affordable housing costs per unit in Boston are creeping toward the million-dollar mark...
The year is 2040. Exactly one law is passed per year, a 13,000 page omnibus appropriations bill that exactly reverses the omnibus appropriations bill that passed the previous year, with the sole exception that each omnibus creates a new type of tax-deferred investment account.
(assuming you contribute equal amounts of money to each child's 529)
Under the new FAFSA form, when applying for financial aid you only have to report a 529 account *for that student*, meaning that if you have n children, you only have to report 1/n of your total 529 assets. Pure arbitrage through faulty reporting rules. thecollegefinanciallady.com/2026/01/13/t...
I love reading securities litigation expert reports because sometimes they're 800 pages long with 650 pages being appendices of asset return time series and earnings call transcripts, and sometimes they're just someone writing a 10 pager and then attaching their CV
I'm proud to announce that I have defended my finance dissertation and that this summer I will become an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Texas at Austin! Most of all, I would like to thank Roberta Romano, whose JD-PhD program in finance changed my career.
Links:
BFP GRATs doc: justice.gov/epstein/file...
Black family meeting doc: justice.gov/epstein/file...
Earlier reporting on Epstein, Black, and GRATs: www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/b...
"BFP" means Black Family Partners, L.P., per an earlier document on a family meeting the Black family had with Epstein on estate planning strategies:
Disgraced former Apollo CEO Leon Black reportedly consulted with Jeffrey Epstein on use of GRATs to dodge estate & gift tax. I searched the Epstein files and found a doc that appears to show that in 2015, Black held over 70% of his family office (value in the billions) in GRATs.
BREAKING: The Tribune confirmed on Instagram that the man shot has died, according to two sources with knowledge of the incident.
ICE attempted to order local police from the scene, but Chief Brian O'Hara refused, sources also told the Tribune. O'Hara instructed his officers to preserve the scene.
Recommended, especially for the insightful point about private equity as a solution to "partner runs."
A couple years ago, for my professional responsibility class I wrote up a paper on what happened to the lawyers at Dewey & LeBoeuf and the implications for partnership governance in the legal industry. It'll be formally published in the UC Law Business Journal! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckG...
www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...
Interesting to me: they find that firms change behavior exclusively as a result of changes in composition at the appellate level, not at the trial court level (here, the federal district courts and the Tax Court; the authors don't use Court of Federal Claims data).
Liked this paper, "Judge Ideology and Corporate Tax Planning," a lot. When the federal Circuit Court of a firm's headquarters becomes more liberal, firms reduce the aggressiveness of their tax planning (proxied by effective tax rate and certain higher-risk maneuvers). papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan…
* Vehicle traffic: -11%
* Foot traffic: +3.4%
* Storefront vacancy: -0.9%
* Pollution: -22%
* Revenue for mass transit: $548M
So YES this has been a huge success.
After SEC intervention, Burford now incorporates expectations of litigation duration and appropriate time value of money discounting onto their balance sheets. A tour of how much of accounting, especially of new asset classes, is a political negotiation, not something that falls from the sky.
I learned a lot from this paper, Valuing Litigation Assets by Robert Weber. Burford Capital, the largest publicly traded litigation finance company, was reporting the fair value of their litigation claims on their quarterly reports using expected value methods that didn't use time value of money!
The American Economic Association's Committee on the Job Market surveyed Economics Departments in the U.S. regarding their plans to hire assistant professors this cycle (2025-26). 29.7% said that their department was under a hiring freeze.
1/3
#EconSky #EconJobMarket
You think this is a niche story, but turns out something like 1/3 of the wealth of the top .1% richest Americans -- prob more than $5 trillion -- is in trusts that will never pay a penny of inheritance tax. Let's fix that, eh?
Source: SSRN eLibrary share.google/AC0TBnGCCASz...