Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called for legislation that would require derivatives to be traded on exchanges or clearinghouses, rather than in over-the-counter (OTC) transactions. This proposed authority over the largely unregulated derivatives multi-trillion-dollar market is aimed at mitigating the systemic risk that contributed to the current global financial crisis. Here are some of the responses to this week’s news.
TheDeal.com identified the stakeholders and explored the politics of derivatives regulation.
The key players here are regulators and payments systems executives around the world, two groups that have long been deeply intertwined and, to the public, mostly invisible. The battlefield has two locales: …read more

I would have liked to call this post Hedge Funds De-Mystified, but that’s not really possible. The beauty, and danger, of hedge funds lies partly in their veil of secrecy. The rest is risk. Hedge funds are the bad boy of investments
What is a Hedge Fund?
As if the complexities of the investment itself weren’t confusing enough, even the name hedge fund is misleading. While many funds make investments that are designed to hedge, or protect against, risk, this is actually a very risky investment. Here are the common characteristics of a the class of investments known as hedge funds:

An investment …read more