Levers of Law Reform: Public Goods and Russian Banking

Cornell International Law Journal Volume 30 Issue 1 1997 Article 2 Levers of Law Reform: Public Goods and Russian Banking Patricia A. McCoy Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cilj Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation McCoy, Patricia A. (1997) "Levers of Law Reform: Public Goods and Russian Banking," Cornell International Law Journal: Vol. 30: Iss. 1, Article 2. Available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cilj/vol30/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell International Law Journal by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact . Levers of Law Reform: Public Goods and Russian Banking Patricia A. McCoy* Today, a half-decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia wobbles precariously between economic transformation and civil strife. After five painful years of market reforms, inflation is down, unemployment is falling, and real incomes are rising. But for many, that progress is too little, too late. Citizen resentment is smoldering, catapulting the communists into the forefront of the summer 1996 presidential elections and fueling fears of a coup, dissolution of the parliament, martial law or civil war. To its vast credit, Russia avoided those catastrophes and successfully navigated the elections, but its political stability remains fragile. This anxious state of affairs thus raises the question whether commercial law reforms designed to enforce market discipline in Russia were too late. 1 There has been general agreement, both among adherents of the "big bang" theory of reform and those who preferred to see economic * Assistant Professor of Law, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University. B.A., Oberlin College; J.D., University of California (Berkeley). Article copyrighted 1997, Patricia A. McCoy. My deepest appreciation to Tobias M.C. Asser, Lane Blumenfeld, Edward R. Brown, Charles A Cadwell, Hiram Chodosh, David Cluchey, Ronald Coffee, Lester Dally, David Fagelson, Joel J. Finer, Edward W. Hill, William E. Holder, Charles Horn. Andrew Howell, William E. Kovacic, Oleg Krasheninnikov, Daniel J. Kreps, Konstantin Lebedev, the late George Lanyi, Tayyab Mahmud, Gregory Mark, Natalia Markalova, Edward Meamus, Dmitriy Nephedov, Perry Newman, Ilya Nikiforov, Jane and Sidney Picker, Vladimir F. Popondopulo, Donald S. Rice, Edward L. Rubin, Mark Ryan, Oleg Sergeev, Vera Shishkina, Brian W. Smith, Yevgeny Sukhanov, Catherine D. Toth, Sergei Voitenko, Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr. and Corinna Wissels for their insights and encouragement. My thanks as well to the participants of the law faculty workshops of Cleveland State and American University for their comments and critiques. I am indebted to my research assistants Diana Clift, Erika Crandall, Konstantin Osipov, Julia Sinitskaya, Dmitriy Tetyushev, Alexy Trusov, and Olesya Trousova for their invaluable work. This article would not have been possible without the unstinting resourcefulness of librarian Bae Smith and the financial support of the Cleveland-Marshall Fund. None of the individuals or entities just mentioned is responsible for the opinions set forth herein, which are mine alone. 1. By law reforms designed to enforce market discipline, I mean statutes, rules and other laws that promote market efficiency by penalizing financial losses. In the banking context, such measures include legally-mandated loan underwriting standards, interest rate deregulation, restrictions on insider loans, collateral forfeiture laws and bankruptcy provisions. See, e.g., infra notes 38-41 and accompanying text. Although privatization laws may also promote market efficiency in a broader sense by providing a potential framework for rewarding gains, most such laws in post-communist countries either did not penalize financial losses at their inception or did so only weakly. Accordingly, I use the term "market discipline" herein only in the narrow, negative sense of penalizing losses. The focus of this Article will be on market discipline measures exerted through the banking sector. 30 CORNELL Ir'L LJ.45 (1997) Cornell InternationalLaw Journal Vol. 30 change proceed at a slower pace, that market-oriented laws in Russia cannot be adopted off-the-rack from Western legal codes. There has not been a consensus, however, on the optimal speed and sequencing of market discipline laws. Some Western advisers subscribe to the view that market discipline laws should have been implemented quickly, both to hasten the creation of new jobs and to avoid the market scandals that could discredit reforms. Others believe that economic liberalization had to precede market discipline laws, and that any attempt to rush through such laws would have been doomed from the start. Those proponents assume, in essence, that market discipline reforms could not take place until the political institutions and psychological attitudes conducive to reform had taken root. Much hangs in the balance of this debate. At stake is the credibility of economic reforms, the welfare of individual citizens and the very survival of Russian democracy. Accordingly, now that reforms in Russia have been underway for five years and President Yeltsin's first term is at an end, it is well and meet to consider whether the transition could have been less painful had accelerated law reforms enforced market discipline. There is no easy answer to this question. Central planning was an abject failure and left the Soviet economy in ruins, generating mass protests for radical economic liberalization. At the same time, Russia, of the newly-independent states, lived under communist rule the longest and had the least entrepreneurial heritage to fall back on from its prerevolutionary, tsarist days. Russia has no tradition of democracy, and democratic institutions are still in their infancy. Civil society, which was brutally suppressed under communism, is only beginning to take on life. Unlike in post-war Germany orJapan, moreover, the old leadership was not put down through military conquest and resurfaced in new positions. Far from being written on a tabula rasa, then, market discipline reforms in Russia are heavily freighted with the past. Nowhere has this been more true than in the reform of Russian banking. The Russian Federation enacted major bank privatization legislation in December 1990, a year before the Soviet Union even disbanded. The 1990 legislation, however, did little to impose market discipline on the banking system or on borrowers. In particular, the 1990 laws were notable for failing to prohibit self-dealing by bank directors and shareholders. No accident, that omission was symptomatic of the entire Soviet approach to finance, in which the banking system served to subsidize state priorities rather than allocate funds to their most pr (...truncated)