Practice

The White House's removal of Joseph Smith as a nominee to be the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency does not bode well for an administration facing so many regulatory jobs to fill, observers said Friday.facing

The SEC study is only the first step in the path to a uniform fiduciary standard.

The National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States cast blame wide and far, in releasing its report Thursday on the causes of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. But not once in the 662-page report did high-frequency traders come up.

While endowments for the last fiscal year were able to post an 11.9% investment return, Commonfund President and CEO Verne Sedlacek said yesterday that most funds are “probably still 25% below where they were in 2007.”

The Investment Management Consultants Association announced that the cumulative pass rate for its CIMA qualification exam was 63% and the for the CIMA certification exam was 58%.

There seems to be a lot of "energy" (and sometimes anger) around the idea that some people provide full-service financial planning and some people call themselves planners while actually selling products or managing assets for a living.

Private fund advisors with more than $1 billion in assets under supervision have a greater need for monitoring, especially after lessons learned during the recent financial crisis, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. So the commission proposed requiring all registered investment advisors that work with one or more private funds to complete a new document, the Form PF. Registered investment advisors who work with hedge and private equity funds, among others, would be required to file the new form periodically.

While Americans have remain committed to saving for retirement through their 401(k)s, a significant portion of households owning financial investments, 37%, have become more conservative in their saving, asset allocation and choice of retirement age, according to a survey of 3,000 households at the end of 2010 by the Investment Company Institute.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Bart Chilton told insittutional investors Wednesday that opponents of changes wrought by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act are trying to block implementation of resulting rules by starving regulators of funding.

The U.K.’s Financial Services Authority fined the firm $1.77 million on Wednesday, bringing its total fines against the firm this month to $13.97 million.