The days of mutual funds touting past performance in advertisements may be numbered.
The right way to limit mutual funds’ leverage in derivatives investments is to require funds to set up “Risk-Adjusted Segregated Amounts” (“RAS Amounts”) based on the risk profiles of the derivatives a fund owns, said a task force of fund lawyers who have been studying this subject since early 2009.
The just-signed Dodd-Frank law has turned out to have a little-noticed provision that sets up mutual fund whistleblowers for a payday.
Money market funds can expect even more competition from commercial banks next year, when the new regulatory reform law will let banks pay interest on demand deposits, Joan Swirsky, partner at Stradley Ronon, predicted.
A federal district court last week held that Edison International's $3 billion 401(k) plan is liable for "substantial" damages because it failed to consider low-cost investment options for the plan, a precedent-setting decision lawyers thought might ultimately get the issue of sponsor fiduciary duty before the Supreme Court.
The Department of Labor has won in the race with Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) over who would be first to set fee disclosure policy.
The Investment Adviser Association wants the European Union to take over policing of short selling abuses in European markets.
Investment Company Institute President Paul Stevens is raising the possibility that the debt crisis could tempt Washington to want to raise revenues in ways that impact mutual funds.
Mutual fund share transactions in 2009 accounted for more sanctions imposed against brokers by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority than any other grouping of penalty causes, just as they did earlier in the decade, according to law firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan.
The Securities and Exchange Commission will be required to conduct 18 separate studies, at least half of which will impact mutual funds, once the financial reform bill passed by Congress becomes law.
Mutual funds that use exotic, riskier derivatives would have to set aside more assets to counterbalance their trades than users of plain vanilla derivatives under a newly floated proposal, according to sister publication Derivatives Week.
Certain mutual funds could lose their exclusion from having to register as commodity pool operators if the National Futures Association has its way.
The “large trader reporting system” the Securities and Exchange Commission wants to set up would garner more industry support if the SEC removes the provision placing the reporting burden on parent companies, wrote industry groups.
The parties at issue in Jones v. Harris Associates are firing legal briefs at each other again.
Capitol Hill insiders are saying that recently planned initiatives to curtail rapidly mounting federal debt may cause Congress to reduce or restructure tax breaks and/or participation levels for 401(k) plans.
The Securities and Exchange Commission lost its chance of independence from Capitol Hill when House and Senate conferees on the financial regulatory reform bill yanked Senate-passed language that would have allowed the SEC to fund itself.
Last month as the House-Senate conference was going on, brokers and advisors fought to a standstill over whether the fiduciary duty to customers currently imposed on advisors should be extended to brokers and insurance sellers.
The Department of Labor has intervened in a class-action lawsuit brought against the McGraw-Hill Companies over the purchase of the firm’s own stock by its employee defined contribution plan.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed updating its antifraud guidance as part of a package of reforms aimed at improving the information given to investors in target-date funds and clarifying the meaning of a date in such funds.
Securities and Exchange Commission and bank regulatory agency officials are working out how to separate bona fide bank collective investment trusts from the phenomenon of the “rent-a-collective trust.”
A senior Treasury Department official was told by plan sponsors last week that annuitizing defined contribution plans is not going anywhere because workers reject the costs they would have to pay to set up lifetime income accounts.
A bill to rationalize the taxing of mutual funds has gained a chance to become law this year, thanks to a hearing held June 15 by a subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Even though Securities and Exchange Commission member Elisse Walter said she favored self-funding by the agency, Walter also reiterated in a London speech earlier this month that she nevertheless also wants a self-regulatory organization overseeing investment advisors.
The SPARK Institute has sprung into action in response to the launching of a 401(k) plan compliance check by the Internal Revenue Service.
Senior Obama administration officials testifying before the Senate Aging Committee next week will launch a discussion on how to free 401(k) plan sponsors from participant class-action lawsuits and big losses if the sponsor picks an annuity seller and the insurer later goes belly up.
Firms looking to shorten their exams can do so by pressuring their custodians to cooperate with the Securities and Exchange Commission's exam staffers, according to Norman Champ, associate regional director of the agency's New York office.
The congressionally-initiated study of whether rich or poor benefit from 401(k) tax deferrals is still grinding ahead at the Government Accountability Office, but at a considerable delay.
Fund boards were urged to keep an eye out for management attempting to convince fund boards to mindlessly sign off on management’s agenda.
The Government Finance Officers Association vote on June 8 to back the money market pricing status quo put more political muscle behind the fight to keep a stable net asset value for money market funds.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has granted no action relief to the American Bar Association’s retirement program for lawyers, the ABA Retirement Funds.
A ruling on 401(k) plan fee disclosure has been postponed after House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Ca.) reportedly flexed his muscles with the White House to halt a rival Department of Labor measure.
Senior industry officials gave the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ringing endorsements as it seeks to become a self-regulatory organization for investment advisors.
Sparring between the two political parties over federal retirement policy has led to a letter from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to the top Republican in the House of Representatives to clarify that the Treasury Department and the Department of Labor have not made any proposal to eliminate 401(k) plans or to force plans to offer annuities.
Big mutual fund firms could be headed for a collision with the "Volcker Rule" if Congress limits the possibility of exempting investment companies.
Just before the new money market fund rule reforms went into effect last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission staff put out Q&A guidance in response to firms’ compliance questions.
The Investment Company Institute restated on its Web site its case against forcing money market fund net asset values to be floated.
To spur more trust in these products by 401(k) sponsors and participants, Washington should create a federally guaranteed insurance fund for annuities and other lifetime income products, retirement security advocates say.
Robert Plaze, the senior Securities and Exchange Commission official on the President's Working Group charged with solving the problem of money fund maturity mismatches that blew up in 2008, does not have an answer.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has rejected the Swiss Helvetia Fund's attempt to omit a shareholder proposal from its 2010 proxy materials.
The Department of Labor has filed an amicus brief with the Seventh Circuit in the Lingis v. Motorola Inc. case, asking the circuit to reverse a district court’s finding that defendant Motorola could rely upon ERISA’s 404 fiduciary safe harbor even though the plan sponsor knew Motorola’s stock was an imprudent investment choice for company workers.
The U.S. mutual fund industry is being urged by its chief regulator to re-examine, in a more positive light, the scenario of investment companies being subjected to International Financial Reporting Standards.
Two powerful members of Congress are trying to tilt the balance of how trillions of dollars in 401(k) assets are invested, sending a letter to the Department of Labor that advocates regulatory changes encouraging more investors to choose target-date fund options over making their own investment choices based on advice.
The House Ways and Means Committee is unlikely to mark up the finance bill that would pass 401(k) fee disclosure into law, dealing a severe blow to chances that Congress will pass it.
Government agencies' invitation to the public to say what federal policy should be on annuitization has finally gotten responses from major players in the debate on covering longevity risk.
Fidelity Investments’ deputy general counsel questioned a high-ranking Department of Labor official on May 7 about what prompted DOL to want to redefine what “fiduciary” means under the ERISA statute, but didn’t get a clear answer.
Phase two in Washington’s effort to upgrade the usefulness of target-date investments to 401(k) participants will be to “check list of best practices” plan fiduciaries can use, Department of Labor Assistant Secretary Phyllis Borzi said in a May 7 appearance at the Investment Company Institute’s general membership meeting.
Luis Aguilar, member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, urges lawmakers to support imposing a fiduciary duty on all those who provide investment advice and questioned the recent watering down of congressional plans in the area.
Complaining of an “operational nightmare,” an official at an Ohio commercial bank has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to write a rule that would make all mutual fund companies provide a single-day accrual rate on a daily basis for the calculation of interest payments on fixed-income mutual funds.
The Department of Labor’s proposed rule for providing advice to 401(k) plans will have the effect of excluding performance-based investment picks by advisors using computer models, and perhaps in other areas of advice-giving as well, said the SPARK Institute in an April 29 comment letter.
There was a high-level face-off this week over what to do about defined contribution retirement savings policy.
A senior House Republican wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 22, warning it against altering the equity market structure without having proof that a change is needed.
The Securities and Exchange Commission should “at least” consider restricting “immediate or cancel” orders or else ponder imposing penalty charges on the ones canceled, the Investment Company Institute said on April 21.
The Investment Company Institute on April 21 made the industry’s case before a House subcommittee that pending legislation requiring every corporate issuer to have an independent chairman should not apply to mutual funds.
A Mutual Fund Directors Forum policy conference brainstorming session on how to address new forms of risk produced a lot of ideas and a sense of the difficulty of the task.
Fund boards are increasingly asking management to explain how individual securities may have affected fund performance from quarter to quarter, according to a white paper on risk management published by the Mutual Fund Directors Forum.
There will not be a push on Capitol Hill to make it easier to sue funds in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Jones v. Harris Associates.
The Investment Company Institute last week said the average stock fund expense ratio rose modestly in 2009 after declining during the previous six years.
Unnoticed in the 1,300 pages of the financial regulatory reform bill the Senate Banking Committee voted to approve on Mar. 22 is a section calling on the Government Accountability Office to do a study of mutual fund advertising and the way the Securities and Exchange Commission regulates it.