Mutualfundreform.com

It has been one year since the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) delivered a report to Congress recommending the adoption of a universal fiduciary standard regulation that would apply to retail advisers and brokers. Now it looks like this long-overdue rule will not even be considered during 2012. The average person would think a year is enough time to consider the fiduciary question, especially since the ideas has been floated…

While they will not take effect until April 2012, the first changes from the new DOL disclosures have already emerged, months before the new rules are slated to become effective.

On July 28, 2008, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson held a curious meeting in New York with about a dozen hedge fund managers.  At the time of the meeting, Bear Stearns had already been forced into a fire sale to JP Morgan Chase for $4 a share four months earlier, and the hybrid mortgage housing agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together had more than $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities…

Federal prosecutions fof certain financial crimes has reached a 20-year low, according to a new report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. 

The ongoing tug-of-war between all parties concerning financial services reform got some added dimensionfrom a report on CBS’s 60 Minutes about  legal insider trading involving the elected members of the U.S. Congress. The report found that trading on insider information involving stocks, IPOs and real estate-related legislation  which nets elected officials millions, yet is perfectly legal.  Those officials who were interviewed (and many refused interview requests) did not acknowledge that these trading patterns…

Companies with good corporate governance standards—those that avoided no poison pills, staggered boards, golden parachutes, and other practices favoring management—helped boost share prices, according to a new study by three university professors: Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School; Alma Cohen of Tel Aviv University and Charles C. Y. Wang of Stanford.  The study found that companies with good corporate governance practices from 2000 to 2008 had incorporated higher valuations into…

The 2008 financial crisis has assumed its role in economic and social history, and continues to get ongoing momentum from the severe recession it created, as well as the ongoing social protests.  Yet while there has been extensive analysis of the misdirected and Frankenstein financial engineering which precipitated the recession, not much is known about the types of people who helped create the current economic crisis in the first place….

Corporations vs. Their Own Employees “Wall Street sort of lost its way, in that investment banking has become a function not of allocating capital properly, but levering capital and levering the returns on capital as opposed to transferring capital to productive industries.”                                                                             –Bill Gross, CEO, PIMCO, as reported by Reuters, Bill Gross’ astute comments were aimed at a number of issues involving the separation of investment banking into two…

Most of the discussions about the need for greater transparency in financial transactions has centered on the need to adopt greater fiduciary responsibilities. But there is also another reason: economic. Mutual funds benefit financially from the lack of transparency.  When fund companies make it difficult for investors to choose between the 8,029 mutual funds and 21,631 different share classes*, the fund companies stand to profit. That’s why fund companies intentionally…

Note: This article was originally published in July 2010.  Investors are still waiting for a decision. After decades of wrangling, false starts, and back room intrigues, it looks like the SEC is finally addressing the long-over due, critical issue of mutual fund fees. Today, these fees charged to fund shareholders amount to $12 billion, according to the SEC. Yet, despite this huge amount, shareholders have no idea what they are…