Regulation

While Wall Street ripped roariously with scandal after scandal in 2002, the fund giants appeared to sit sanguinely on the sidelines. Insiders, on the other hand, know that the mutual fund industry didn't quite get by without a few scrapes of its own.

In a move that has been condemned by the mutual fund industry, The Securities and Exchange Commission last week endorsed a proposal that would force complexes to disclose their portfolio holdings four times each year. Funds currently have to disclose the information twice a year.

The Investment Company Institute has dismissed a Securities and Exchange Commission initiative that would require fund companies to disclose how they vote on proxies, insisting that the proposal would favor political groups and pose a risk to shareholders and fund complexes.

The National Association of Securities Dealers of Washington has won a legal battle against a publisher who uses NASDR data about broker/dealers. A federal court in Florida dismissed a lawsuit brought by the publisher, Edward Siedle, who demanded access to NASDR data, saying NASDR could restrict information that appears on its public disclosure Web site and how that information can be used.

He got the markets running in less than a week after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and waged the most aggressive reforms in the history of the SEC. In the end, it was his own bravado (wanting to be named to the Cabinet) and impediments to true bottom-line numbers (through his poor choice of chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and conflict of interest over his previous work for AOL), that took Chairman Harvey Pitt down.

The 401(k) reform bills that have been brewing in Washington for the past year will likely be tabled until the 2003 session of Congress.

Firms Scramble Ahead of SEC Decision to Comply With Law

Proxying fund shareholders is often seen as a necessary evil in order to make significant changes to a fund, or, in some cases, liquidate it.

With shareholder activism and corporate governance such a hot topic lately, MFMN set out to discover what's driving shareholder proxies these days, and what kind of response rates they're getting.

When former President Bill Clinton signed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act in April 2000, there was wide speculation that e-signatures would transform not just financial services but e-commerce as well.