Randall Guynn has headed the Financial Institutions Group at the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell since 1994, the year after he became a partner of the firm.
NEW YORK, NY, May 12, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Randall Guynn with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Mr. Guynn celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Mr. Guynn has headed the Financial Institutions Group at the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell since 1994, the year after he became a partner of the firm. He is widely recognized as one of the country's top bank regulatory and M&A lawyers. But perhaps his most important contribution to the legal field was his leading role in developing a workable solution to the too-big-to-fail problem. That problem refers to the inclination of government authorities to bail out certain banks if they become so large or complex that allowing them to fail might destabilize the financial system.
His solution has two parts. The first is known as the single-point-of-entry (SPOE) recapitalization within resolution strategy. He developed it with Don Bernstein, his partner at Davis Polk and one of the country's leading bankruptcy lawyers. They developed it in consultation with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve. The core feature of that strategy is pushing a banking group's losses from its operating subsidiaries to its parent holding company. This results in recapitalizing the group's operating subsidiaries and imposing its losses on the shareholders and long-term bondholders of its top-tier parent.
The second part is what Guynn calls the equivalent of Doc Brown's flux capacitor in the movie Back to the Future: it is what makes the SPOE strategy possible. It is the insight that long-term bonds need to be junior to short-term debt so that losses can be imposed on long-term bondholders without imposing them pro-rata on short-term creditors. This type of creditor hierarchy dramatically increases a banking group's "usable" total loss-absorbing capacity—that is, the capacity to impose losses on shareholders and long-term creditors who cannot "run" so that they don't have to be imposed on short-term creditors who can run. A run is a stampede by short-term creditors to withdraw all their money at once or refuse to rollover their short-term debt.
Before joining Davis Polk, Mr. Guynn was a law clerk to Justice William H. Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court. He graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law after receiving an economics degree with highest honors from Brigham Young University. He is married to Robin Quinn, and they are the proud parents of seven children. They are active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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