Word: sec
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...improve oversight, Markey wants to double, at least, the 110 SEC regulators who police funds. "The regulators are spinning their wheels, not coming close to keeping pace with a decade of spectacular growth," says a senior House staff member. "We're not worried about Fidelity, Vanguard or Merrill Lynch. But we need greater resources to look at the newer funds...
Markey also wants the SEC to exert stricter control over fund advertising, particularly when funds boast about their performance ranking. Investors face a barrage of claims that one fund or another ranks No. 1 in its field, no matter how narrowly that field is defined. To clear up such matters, Markey wants the SEC to require any fund claiming to be No. 1 to state how many funds it was comparing itself with and over what period of time...
...sweeping case was virtually unprecedented among SEC actions, which are typically narrower in scope. "In effect, the SEC reviewed a course of conduct that stretched over a decade and said it was systematically bad," noted Joel Seligman, a University of Michigan law professor. Concedes a Prudential spokesman: "We made some real mistakes in terms of how the partnerships were marketed and sold." In all, some 400,000 individual investors lost money on the deals...
While Prudential neither admitted nor denied that it broke the law, its arrangement with the SEC commits it to a punishing regimen of repayment of losses that the agency says Prudential Bache foisted on its customers. (Pru Bache is the old name for the securities unit of Prudential Insurance.) The deals involved more than 700 partnerships ranging from energy exploration to commercial real estate, ventures that normally attract sophisticated, high- income investors...
...discretion on the Pru's dime, who will sift through customers' claims. "If you're a widow for whom the purchase of a risky oil-and-gas partnership was inappropriate and you were told it was safe, you're very likely to get compensation," says Thomas Newkirk, an associate SEC enforcement director who worked on the case. "But this is not money from heaven; people will have to prove their claims...