Commentary
The September 2013 Office of Financial Research (OFR) report entitled “Asset Management and Financial Stability” attempts to present a critical analysis of how asset management firms and the activities in which they engage can introduce vulnerabilities that could pose, amplify, or transmit threats to financial stability.
The federal government is not now and has never been in the business of telling you how you should vote your proxies. But it seems that through regulatory creep, the government may have indirectly given the power to tell investors how to vote their proxies to someone else entirely. Regulating disclosures and mechanics by which we vote proxies is plainly within the scope of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s mission.
Over the past sixty years, as more and more people in the US have begun to participate in the capital markets through retirement plans, mutual funds, ETFs and other pooled investment vehicles, institutional investors have grown from bit players in the markets, owning about 5% of US equities prior to 1945, to being major players today, owning greater than 67% of US equities. This growth in the proportion of assets managed by institutional investors has also been accompanied by a dramatic growth over the same period in the market capitalization of US listed companies.
CSFME’s executive director, Ed Blount, has written a new book review for the ABA Banking Journal. Mr. Blount reviews “China’s Super Bank” by Henry Sanderson and Michael Forsythe, in which the authors present what Blount calls a worthy history of the role of the China Development Bank in less than three decades of urbanization.
Repo is very much in the news lately, even coming up on the radar screen of the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson. Morgenson penned an article in the Times’ September 14, 2013 issue, After a Financial Flood, Pipes Are Still Broken, in which she worries that despite new rules on derivatives, the repo market remains largely unregulated.