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West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Along with an award for Hedge Fund Administrator of the year for their alternative investment services (AIS), the Bank of New York Mellon received 6 other awards at the International Custody & Fund Administration (ICFA) Global Awards 2009 in London.
BNY Mellon also received the award for White Paper of The Year for ‘Inside the Engine Room’, published in June 2008, which examined the operational challenges and opportunities for Nordic institutions.
The Global Awards judging panel included Dr Werner Frey, CEO of the European Securities Forum and Angela Knight, CEO of The British Bankers Association.
"Receiving both the Hedge Fund Administrator and Broker Dealer Custody & Clearing Provider awards shows that the industry has a profound appreciation of how we continue to meet the needs of our clients as their business models converge and evolve." Art Certosimo, Head of Alternative Investment & Broker-Dealer Services, said, "We are offering a unique combination of administration, custody, collateral management and liquidity services that enables our clients to deliver the services and transparency that investors are seeking."
Alex Akesson
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Reuters – A U.S.-based trade group for hedge funds has urged the Bank of England to step in and speed up the freeing up of assets frozen in the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, saying it has become "an issue of very substantial systemic significance."
Richard Baker, a former U.S. congressman who heads the Managed Funds Association (MFA), said the lock-up of Lehman assets threatens British prime brokerage businesses and "will exacerbate systemic risks if not handled properly."
He made the plea in a letter dated Oct. 13, sent to the British central bank’s governor on the eve of a meeting between the administrators of Lehman Brothers International (Europe) (LBIE) and UK regulators.
Baker also said the current process is adding more uncertainty to global markets and that expediting the return of assets will give the market "a much needed boost of liquidity and confidence."
AllAboutAlpha.com – The Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland was probably abuzz last week watching history unfold before its eyes. After all, one of the lynchpins of the organization’s Basel II Accord was the requirement for banks to mark-to-market all assets – including less liquid ones. And it appears that doing so in a leveraged environment has put several banks into a death spiral in recent weeks (see featured post below).
But the BIS is also keeping an eye on hedge fund leverage. The organization just released a working paper called “Estimating Hedge Fund Leverage” that proposes a new method of calculating the level of leverage used by hedge funds and, it is hoped, a way to measure any resulting systemic risks to the financial system. Regular readers may remember that this topic was also covered by the Fed’s Tobias Adrian last year.
As the authors of this report point out, leverage comes in two basic forms: funding leverage – where you literally borrow money to goose returns (or losses) and instrument leverage - where the securities themselves have leverage baked in (such as a futures contract, option or swap). But at the end of the day, if a fund rises twice as much as the market on “up” days and falls twice as much on “down” days, then the source of leverage is less relevant. In fact, divining leverage based on historical returns will also capture the leverage implicit in the balance sheets or business models of individual securities.
