Financial Blog

BRUSSELS, May 18 (Xinhua) -- European Union (EU) finance ministers on Tuesday agreed on tough regulation on hedge funds despite differences among the 27 member states of the bloc.

After a roundtable debate, the finance ministers concluded a general approach on regulating alternative investment fund managers (AIFM), which will also be on the agenda of the G20 summit to be held in Canada in June to find a way of overseeing and supervising such funds.

A statement released after the meeting said that the draft directive was aimed at "establishing a harmonized framework" for monitoring and supervising the risks that alternative investment funds pose. Source

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO law professor Elena Kagan was right to complain, in her now-famous 1995 book review, that ever since the failed nomination of Robert Bork, Supreme Court confirmation hearings have been reduced to “a vapid and hollow charade, in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints.’’ She was correct when she insisted upon “the essential rightness — the legitimacy and the desirability — of exploring a Supreme Court nominee’s set of constitutional views and commitments’’ and lamented that “the problem is not that senators engage in substantive discussion with Supreme Court nominees; the problem is that they do not.’’

Above all Kagan was on the mark when — in describing the content-free confirmation hearings of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — she wrote that both nominees knew that “the safest and surest route to the prize lay in alternating platitudinous statement and judicious silence,’’ and commented: “Who would have done anything different, in the absence of pressure from members of Congress?’’ Source

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