The Cost of Conflicts of Interest
John P. Freeman* & Stewart L. Brown**
The Journal of Corporation Law, University of Iowa | Spring, 2001
* Campbell Professor of Legal and Business Ethics, University of South Carolina. B.B.A., 1967; J.D., 1970, University of Notre Dame; LL.M. 1976, University of Pennsylvania. Member, Ohio and South Carolina Bars.
** Professor of Finance, Florida State University. B.S.B.A., 1970; M.B.A. 1971; Ph.D. 1974, University of Florida; CFA.
Text: 28,783 words
SUMMARY:
… In the early 1970s, America’s mutual fund industry was suffering net redemptions, meaning it was contracting in size. … Wildly different fee structures apply to equity portfolio investment advisory services purchased by public pension funds on the free market compared to the same form of services purchased by investor-owned mutual funds. … ” Other evidence that advisory fee structures are unusually lucrative in the fund industry in comparison with pension advisory business comes in the form of reports that fund advisor buy-outs are more costly than acquisitions of firms that advise pensions. … Regressions of the following form were run on both the pension and mutual fund data: Advisory Fee = a + b (Ln Size), where the advisory fees are scaled in whole basis points, and size is scaled in millions of dollars under management. … This means that equity portfolio size explains only 6% of the variation of mutual fund advisory fees but 27% of pension advisory fee. … ” A fund shareholder who today seeks “clear disclosure” about the advisor’s bill for portfolio management, its advisor’s profitability, or its demonstrated willingness to perform comparable services for significantly lower prices will not find this information…
Citation:
n200 Improving Price Competition, supra note 40, at 79-93 (statement of Matthew P. Fink, President, Investment Company Institute). In fairness, Mr. Fink is not alone in extolling the fund industry’s alleged competitiveness. See, e.g., Alyssa A. Lappen, Funds Follies, Inst. Inv., Oct. 1993, at 39 (“[A] pressing concern [is] quite simply, whether the nation’s banks, as a group, have the financial – or intellectual – wherewithal to succeed in the ferociously competitive mutual fund business.”)….
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Alyssa A. Lappen
Alyssa A. Lappen is a U.S.-based investigative journalist. She is the former Managing Editor at the Leeb Group (2012-2017); a former Senior Fellow of the American Center for Democracy (2005-2008); and a former Senior Editor of Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991). She served six of her 12 years at Forbes (1978-1990) as an Associate Editor. Ms. Lappen was also a staff reporter at The New Haven Register (1975-1977). During a decade as a freelance, her work appeared in Big Peace, Pajamas Media, Front Page Magazine, American Thinker, Right Side News, Family Security Matters, the Washington Times and many other Internet and print journals. Ms. Lappen also contributed to the Terror Finance Blog, among others. She supports the right of journalists worldwide to write without fear or restriction on politics, governments, international affairs, terrorism, terror financing and religious support for terrorism, among other subjects. Ms. Lappen is also an accomplished poet. Her first full-length collection, The Minstrel's Song, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in April 2015. Her poems have been published in the 2nd 2007 edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and both 2007 issues of Wales' award-winning Seventh Quarry: Swansea Poetry Magazine. Dozens of her poems have appeared in print and online literary journals and books. She won the 2000 annual Ruah: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry chapbook award and has received a Harvard Summer Poetry Prize and several honorable mentions.