ICI Viewpoints Content

Challenges abound in our increasingly global world, said Tony Blair, former prime minister of the United Kingdom. Yet our future could be brighter than ever, he insisted. Blair’s stirring words came during a keynote speech at ICI’s 56th General Membership Meeting (GMM). After his...

The fund industry needs to stop focusing on the moment and start focusing on outcomes when advising investors on their resources, said Laurence D. Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, at ICI’s Annual Policy Forum, part of the Institute’s 56th General Membership Meeting (GMM).

Over the past year, policymakers who are focused on financial stability have pursued a theory that mutual fund investors can destabilize financial markets by redeeming from funds when markets decline. According to this theory, redemptions by fund investors lead fund managers to sell...

Since the financial crisis, regulators in the United States and abroad have been looking for ways to prevent a repeat. But recently it seems they’ve gone off course.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB)—composed of financial regulators and central bankers from around the globe—is proposing a flawed methodology that inappropriately puts regulated U.S. funds under scrutiny for possible designation as global systemically important financial...

We have spent the past several days discussing why efforts by international and domestic regulators to examine mutual funds as sources of systemic risk are unnecessary and inappropriate.

In their search for ways that investment funds can pose risks to the financial system, regulators and central bankers from around the globe have proposed an arbitrary threshold: any investment fund with assets of more than $100 billion should automatically be subjected to further...

U.S. and international banking regulators, in their search for ways that mutual funds and their managers could threaten financial stability, have come up with a simple story: fund investors and asset managers “crowd or ‘herd’ into popular asset classes or securities” and thus “magnify...

Second in a series of Viewpoints postings on funds and financial stability. The threshold set by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) for examining whether a regulated fund could pose risk to the financial system should be redrawn—or better yet, withdrawn.

U.S. and international regulators are examining whether asset managers or the investment funds that they offer could be sources of risk to the overall financial system and should thus be designated as systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs).