AIMA

AIMA statement on FSA hedge fund survey

“AIMA, the global hedge fund trade association, welcomes the new hedge fund survey published today by the Financial Services Authority and believes it is a useful assessment of the larger hedge fund managers that it supervises. We particularly welcome and endorse the FSA’s key finding that hedge funds are currently unlikely to be a major source of systemic risk.

“This survey highlights the fact that the FSA has been proportionate in its approach to tackling systemic risk by requiring only the UK’s larger hedge fund managers to report systemically-relevant data. We have for a long time supported the periodic reporting by larger managers of systemically relevant information to supervisors and other macro-prudential authorities in the interests of mitigating systemic risk.

“The survey is also welcome for its carefully considered approach to the difficult area of leverage definitions. It underlines that there is no one single definition of leverage, which is why we believe that regulatory proposals contained in the draft Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive to limit it based on a one-size-fits-all approach would be difficult to implement.”

Andrew Baker, CEO, AIMA

24 February 2010

For media enquiries, please contact Christen Thomson, AIMA’s Director of Communications, on +44 (0)20 7822 8380; email – cthomson@aima.org