Capital Markets Union

The muted plans for CMU will always remain half-baked without a common legal landscape. Only when buying shares in any company sited in the EU is as simple/safe/painless as buying shares in an Oregon company by an investor in Alabama will we reach this Nirvana. Pie in the Sky?

Capital and Chutzpah: Why US has more than Europe

Dark Pools - who brings light into them?

News that Credit Suisse has reached a settlement on the 'dark pool' probe may bring relief to its shareholders, management and some market professionals. But it still leaves open the question how the practice of executing orders in these pools is policed. By definition the transactions are designed to provide a certain (total?) amount of privacy and anonymity. Market impact is (hopefully in the eyes of the users) lessened. But are the prices achieved fair - especially for the ultimate owners of the assets bought or sold, the investors holding the mutual funds or pension funds that are using dark pools? Are all transactions logged and published so that the end investor can check them against a consolidated tape (price, amount and exact time?). If not then this leaves too much leeway and encourages trickery that would rival the abuses that came to light in the foreign exchange and interbank (Libor) markets.

Money Laudering: what is a 'suspicious' transaction?

Apart from finance professionals being clairvoyants it is extremely tricky to safely fulfil the regulator's insistence to report all suspicious transactions. With hindsight it is always possible for authorities to hit banks and asset managers with a big club and claim a transaction should have been reported. The only really safe procedure would be to report ALL transactions and put the burden of compliance on the shoulders of the regulators. Alternatively there should be an EXHAUSTIVE and detailed checklist giving details of any signs that should arouse suspicion. As always we want to remind readers that in our opinion poor and unnecessary legislation or sloppy work by police authorities are the real reasons for the anti-money laundering hysteria. There was no more crime before the politicians invented the need to control citizens more and more in a costly, intrusive - and ultimately ineffective - way.