BBC – Under the EU plans, hedge funds would be required to be more open, and their ability to borrow would be limited.

The Mayor is concerned that if these rules are adopted, hedge funds will be driven to relocate outside the EU.

London is the current home of 80% of Europe’s hedge funds, but they could be tempted to move to Switzerland and the US.

Hedge funds have been blamed for contributing to the financial crisis and threatening future financial stability.

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Tags: bbc, europe, financial crisis, financial-stability, hedge funds, london, switzerland

Times Online – Investment returns have been diabolical. Share values collapsed last year by 30 per cent. Commercial property — office blocks and shops — slumped in value. Hedge funds, in which the BBC fund has been dabbling, proved far from damage-proof.

Liabilities have been rocketing because of soaring life expectancy. Bluntly, former BBC personnel have not been dying as early as the fund’s actuaries predicted that they would.

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Tags: actuaries, bbc, hedge funds, investment-returns, liabilities, life expectancy, office blocks, proof, share values

BBC – In much of continental Europe, there’s a widespread belief that hedge funds and private equity firms caused the global economic crisis.

Which is presumably one reason why the European Commission wants much tighter regulation of both the hedgies and the buyout boys.

I’ve had personal experience of this, in a recent interview for French telly on how to prevent a repetition of the disaster: more-or-less all my interlocutor wanted to discuss was the alleged imperative of constraining the activities of hedge funds; there wasn’t even a nod at the reality that far more of the real culprits were in the banks, including French banks.

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Tags: bbc, belief-that, continental europe, culprits, disaster, european commission, french banks, global economic crisis, hedgies, imperative, interlocutor, nod, personal experience, private equity firms, repetition, telly