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I have piece in today’s Mint arguing that the Volkswagen emission scandal is a wake-up call for all financial regulators worldwide: The implications of big firms such as Volkswagen using software to cheat their customers go far beyond a few million diesel cars The Volkswagen emissions scandal challenges us to move beyond Ronald Reagan’s favourite Russian proverb “trust but verify” to a more sceptical attitude: “distrust and cross-check”. [ 836 more words. ]

https://jrvarma.wordpress.com/…/10/19/distrust-and-cross-ch…

Twitter or Newswires: Are regulators behind the curve? Last week, I read two stories that made me wonder how regulators are far behind the curve when it comes to new media. First, Business Insider reported that after the newswire hacking scandal (which I blogged about last month), Goldman Sachs was considering announcing its earnings on Twitter instead of on the newswires. [ 146 more words. ]

https://jrvarma.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/1069/

Bloomberg TV carried an interview with me last week. The video is available at the channel’s website. Among several other things, the interview also covered the Amtek Auto episode that I have blogged about in the past. I argued that Amtek Auto is unlikely to be the last episode of distressed corporate bonds in mutual fund portfolios, and we need to be more proactive in future.

https://jrvarma.wordpress.com/…/12/interview-in-bloomberg-tv

Last month, I read four seemingly unrelated papers which all point towards problems posed by large fund managers. Ben-David, Franzoni, Moussawi and Sedunov (The Granular Nature of Large Institutional Investors) show that the stocks owned by large institutions exhibit stronger price inefficiency and are also more volatile. They also study the impact of Blackrock’s acquisition of Barclays Global Investors (which the authors for some strange reason choose to identify only as “a mega-merger between two large institutional investors that took place at the end of 2009”). [ 523 more words. ]

https://jrvarma.wordpress.com/…/are-large-fund-managers-pro…