IOSCO Short Selling, iShares, Treasury Tim's Toxic Tonic ... and Me!

There is LOTS of news today, so my main job has been to stay in touch with everything, rather than having the luxury of being able to interpret, analyse and opine.

IOSCO Short Selling Report

The biggest news from a securities lending point of view is that the long-awaited IOSCO Consultation Document on the Regulation of Short Selling was released today.  The document contains its proposed principles it hopes will be used in fostering a more consistent international approach to short selling.  It has just come out this morning, so I haven’t gone through it yet, however the covering Press Release has identified Four Principles that IOSCO would like to see used by regulators around the world.

I don’t think there is much objectionable about these goals, so the devil is in the details which I will go through in the coming days.  I will also be looking for comments from other people, so please send them to me, or post comments on the site.
The Consultation Period deadline is 4 May 2009.

 

iShares

If you have been following me on twitter this weekend, you would have seen that private equity investors Hellman & Friedman may be assembling a group to bid on the Barclays iShares ETF business.  Unattributed stories around the sale of iShares is that Barclays is interested in funding the purchase, up to a rumoured 80% of the deal.  H&F bought Gartmore about 3 years ago through one of its funds.  You can read coverage of the story here. 

Treasury Reveals Toxic Assets Plan

(Finally) The biggest news in the markets today is the release of Tim Geithner's plan for helping relieve US banks from the albatross of toxic assets.  There will be far more learned commentary than mine forthcoming, so I am sitting back and absorbing the thoughts of others.

Global Custodian Video

You can catch my latest video for Global Custodian Magazine in their Multimedia section here.