Although the mutual fund industry has grown phenomenally in recent years and now holds more than $8 trillion in securities, it still operates in a highly competitive market. Mutual funds today face strong competition from defined contribution plans and particularly from 401(k) investments. Administrators of 401(k) and other pension plans,...

Congress created the credit union charter in 1934 to establish small, local, mutual associations of “people of small means seeking to protect themselves from high rate money lenders.” A lot has changed in the intervening seventy years, including the transformation of many formerly mutual organizations into stock-issuing corporations, and the...

This is the second in a series of conferences to explore the regulation of mutual funds. Mutual funds are only one form of collective investment vehicle regulated at the federal level. Other categories include bank common trust funds and collective investment funds, both of which are exempt from the...

When the bubble deflated in 2007, an unprecedented number of weak mortgages went into default - those that were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie, and those that had been securitized by Wall Street. This drove down housing prices and threw Fannie and Freddie into insolvency. 

The recently announced acquisition of Nationwide Federal Credit Union by Nationwide Bank brings a whole new perspective to the credit union conversion issue.

Wharton School professor Joseph Gyourko explains in a new research paper, Is FHA the Next Housing Bailout?, that the FHA will need a massive $50 to $100 billion bailout unless the economy makes a swift recovery.

The scandal surrounding Solyndra — the now-bankrupt, Obama-connected solar power company that received a federally guaranteed loan of $573 million — is well known. But Solyndra, Peter Schweizer says, is only the tip of the iceberg.

This book recommends the creation of a new, alternative legal structure for collective investment, the "managed investment trust."