The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by the formidable Henry Waxman, will today hold a hearing on hedge funds and the financial market.
According to preliminary reports, it promises to be a zinger. Via DealBook:
“Some experts call them the shadow banking system because they operate almost entirely unregulated,” Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, the chairman of the committee, told The Times. “Very little is known about how they operate and the types of systemic risk they can generate.”
“On Capitol Hill, there certainly is appetite for more hedge fund regulation,” Houman B. Shadab, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, who will testify at the House hearing, told The Times. “It’s not obvious to me that hedge funds caused this crisis, but they have been affected by it, there’s no doubt about that.”
In the dock:
- John Alfred Paulson, President, Paulson & Co., Inc. (prepared testimony)
- George Soros, Chairman, Soros Fund Management, LLC (prepared testimony)
- James Simons, President, Renaissance Technologies, LLC
- Philip A. Falcone, Senior Managing Partner, Harbinger Capital Partners (prepared testimony)
- Kenneth C. Griffin, Chief Executive Officer and President, Citadel Investment Group, LLC (prepared testimony)
Expert witnesses:
- Professor Andrew Lo, Director, MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management
- Professor David Ruder, Northwestern University School of Law, Former Chairman, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- Professor Joseph Bankman, Stanford University Law School
- Houman Shadab, Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University
