Institutional Investor (August 12)
“Institutional investors have long called for better transparency and disclosure regarding fees, expenses, pass-through costs, and conflicts of interest,” but the SEC’s private fund adviser rules “were struck down in June after being challenged in court by a number of industry organizations largely representing managers.” The “regulatory saga” seemed to pit “investors and managers against one another…. But this picture is too simple, ignoring the industry’s own track record of collaboration to improve practices and address many of these challenges.” Going forward, “stakeholders must pick up where regulators left off.”
Tags: Collaboration, Conflicts of interest, Costs, Court, Disclosure, Expenses, Fees, Institutional investors, Managers, Regulators, SEC, Stakeholders, Transparency
Institutional Investor (April 24)
To strengthen their balance sheets, large banks (including Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Barclays) have been reducing their commodities businesses, mainly through sales to independent trading companies. With these sales “to smaller players, conflicts of interest remain a potential problem” and nobody’s sure whether new problems will accompany this major shift. Given the skinnier balance sheets of the new players, market liquidity could conceivably suffer. In addition, “concerns abound that the underlying problems that have traditionally beset the commodities markets are simply being pushed onto a new and less tightly regulated set of actors.”
Tags: Balance sheets, Banks, Barclays, Commodities, Conflicts of interest, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Liquidity, Morgan Stanley, Regulated, Royal Bank of Scotland, Shift, Trading, UBS
