Week InReview | 'Billions' actor studies hedge fund managers | OFR: U.S. bilateral repos amount to $1.8 trillion | High-yield bond funds said to face SEC scrutiny | ICYMI + Binge Reading
'I found the hedge-fund guys I met all to be very, very concentrated listeners - watchful and articulate and quick to defend, if needed. They all seemed to have this contained sitting posture. The legs, if they weren't crossed at right angles, tended to be close over the knee, their hands put together.'
Actor Damian Lewis
Who studied hedge-fund managers for his role in the TV series 'Billions'
U.S. bilateral repos amount to $1.8 trillion
Treasury's OFR assesses industry's size
(Jan 13)
The Office of Financial Research released a brief, The U.S. Bilateral Repo Market: Lessons from a New Survey, and a blog by the OFR deputy director for research and analysis. The brief provides aggregate statistics on U.S. dealers' bilateral repurchase, or repo, agreements and economically equivalent securities lending activities. The data were collected from the U.S.-affiliated securities dealers of nine bank holding companies under a voluntary pilot program run by the OFR and the Federal Reserve System with input from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
(Jan 13) The SEC has asked mutual funds and ETFs for information on how they price less-liquid securities. Specific requests included:
Daily internal illiquidity calculations from Aug. 31 to Dec. 15
A list of large fund shareholders
Daily inflow/outflow data
Disclosures concerning 'liquidity, quality of portfolio composition and/or redemption activity for each fund'
Feedback on whether the prices have ever been challenged
It isn't clear how many managers received the December letters, which reportedly asked for some of the data within 24 hours and the rest within a week.
