Supervisão de Hedge Funds

Segue artigo de Chet Currier - Bloomberg - sobre a supervisão de hedge funds nos EUA.

Hedge Funds Will Be Regulated, One Way or Another: Chet Currier
July 14 (Bloomberg) -- Don't be misled by the recent news that a U.S. court blocked the Securities and Exchange Commission from regulating hedge funds.
The hot-as-a-pistol $1.2 trillion hedge fund business hasn't permanently escaped the clutches of regulators. It has only postponed the inevitable.
As these fast-moving, risk-prone vehicles keep attracting a wider following, they present a higher and higher profile politically as well as financially and economically. In the words of the old jungle metaphor, the higher the monkey climbs the tree the more he exposes his rear.
The SEC's plan mandating that hedge funds register with the agency and submit to random inspections was really quite a cautious step.
``It's the mildest kind of regulation,'' said Arthur Levitt Jr., a former SEC chairman and a director of Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News. ``If there is a hedge fund scandal, and there probably will be some time in the future, Congress will step in with something much more draconian.''
Court decision or no court decision, scrutiny of hedge funds is increasing from all directions. Morningstar Inc., the Chicago-based mutual-fund and stock research firm, has started tracking investment results and fees at 3,000 of the estimated 8,000 hedge funds now in operation.
Into the Light
``Hedge funds are coming downstream trying to appeal more to Middle America,'' said Don Phillips, a Morningstar managing director. ``You can't do that and operate in the secrecy that this industry has today.''
If politicians, independent researchers and the press aren't enough to contend with, hedge funds also face pressures from their customers -- at least that growing part of their customer base represented by investing institutions operating under the strictures of fiduciary responsibility.
As Paul Atkins, an SEC commissioner, observed recently, many hedge-fund advisers will remain registered at the insistence of their pension-fund clients.
Just possibly, hedge fund managers themselves will also come to see regulation as a beneficial thing. That may seem hard to imagine, especially if you think of the regulation in question as costly, bureaucratic meddling that fails to recognize how the business works and denies fund managers the free hand they need to do their jobs.
Heavy Hand
Regulation can certainly be like that. And hedge funds are a complex business to understand, what with the many different styles and strategies they pursue.
So a key first step in any workable system for regulating hedge funds is to define the term. Where, for starters, can we sensibly draw a line of demarcation between a private individual investor, handling money for a few family members or friends, and a hedge-fund manager?
Sooner or later, these questions will demand to be answered. Sooner may work out better for the hedge-fund business, if it means getting to those answers through a voluntary cooperative effort rather than an inquisition.
Though hedge funds differ from mutual funds in many important ways, the hedge funds can always look to the history of mutual funds for instructive precedent.
Law and Order
The early, wild-and-wooly days of mutual funds and their cousins, closed-end funds, in the 1920s ended in disaster with the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s.
That set the stage for the Investment Company Act of 1940, which today is acclaimed as an exemplar of good regulation. By shutting the door on such temptations as using funds as a dumping ground for unwanted stocks and bonds, the '40 act made it possible for mutual funds to enjoy storybook growth and prosperity.
In the early 2000s, that prosperity -- indeed, the funds' very image as trustworthy -- proved strong enough to withstand a scandal over trading and sales practices. The SEC, even though it was criticized for being slow to spot the abuses and take action against them, played a key role there. If Congress hadn't been satisfied that a reasonable system of regulation was already in place, it would have imposed one.
Events now are pushing hedge funds toward their own version, in some form, of the 1940 act and SEC regulation. If they don't move willingly in that direction, the day may come when they wish they had.
(Chet Currier is a Bloomberg News columnist. His opinions are his own.)