What is the purpose of regulation? What are we really trying to achieve? What should the world look like after it has been regulated? Many “stakeholders” assent to the concept of regulation as a tool to fix a problem, but is there any clear idea about what the outcomes should be? It is very...

Bonds governed under German law would normally not contain collective action clauses, ie provisions dealing with majority decisions by bondholders by which certain bond terms may be altered or waived. This is because it is uncertain whether, in the absence of a statutory basis, a decision taken...

When Equitable Life went to court in a case concerning the bonus rates it applied to pension policies with guaranteed annuity options, it emphasised that its rules gave it wide discretion in its bonus decisions, an argument that was unsuccessful. This paper considers the constraints on the...

In this brief paper the authors consider the duties owed by professional indemnity insurance brokers to their insured clients. Given the prevalence of claims for financial mis‐selling this is an important issue of concern to all authorised advisers. Any failure to obtain or maintain cover...

Fair value pricing is a critical issue for mutual funds with international market exposure because trading in the underlying foreign securities is not synchronous with US market trading. Using a sample of Japanese open‐end mutual funds that trade in the USA, this paper explores the potential...

The objective of this work is to analyse worldwide trends in financial supervision architectures. The focus is on the key issue in the debate – the single supervisor versus multiauthority model – in order to build up indexes of supervision unification, essential to perform studies on the...

Michael Foot, one of the initial managing directors of the Financial Services Authority when it was founded in 1998, looks back over his six year period in office. He identifies the main external and internal challenges that the new body faced and explains how management sought to articulate and...

The Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR) has an important role in the fourlevel Lamfalussy process for regulatory reform. At present, CESR produces at level 3 administrative guidelines, interpretative recommendations, common standards, peer reviews and comparisons of regulatory...

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision under the auspices of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a consultation paper in late 2003 on the compliance function in banks. The aim of the consultation paper is to set out the views of banking supervisors and provide basic...

The Basel Committee has proposed a new capital framework to respond to the deficiencies of the 1988 Capital Accord (Basel I). The 1988 Accord has been criticised for its crude assessment of risk and for creating opportunities for regulatory arbitrage. In principle, the new approach, often...