From FISD Wiki

Transparency

Recent press pieces related to market transparency:

Citi CEO Pandit Op-Ed, WSJ June 27, 2008 (subscription required).

NY Times "Dealbook" dialogue.

Interesting analysis of the Pandit piece at TheDeal.com:

"Opacity, by the way, is not synonymous with illegality, which the media often concludes. True, sometimes skeevy activities can take place in the dark, but more often than not an opaque market may simply be an immature, undiscovered pool of value. Of course, nothing stays opaque for very long, unless you create a fantasy, a bubble, about its prospects. This, as we know, ends badly.

But if you magically remove all opacity -- creating a truly transparent regime -- you also extract much of the risk and reward from the game, and you transform financial services into a Web-based order taker. Of course, given the world we live in, given human failings and differences, a purely transparent system is utopian. That's good for finance because a purely transparent system would also compress profits dramatically."

Information Provenance

FSA Guidance/"BreakWaters"

The UK regulator, the FSA, has published guidelines creating the opportunity for market participants to formulate best practices that the FSA will review and either accept or reject. While not creating a "safe harbor", these guidelines will, in the FSA's terminology, provide firms with "breakwaters".

Background materials related to the FSA's "Breakwater" initiatives:
General introductory material is here. Specific criteria are here while a flowchart describing the process is here.

There are currently three Confirmed Guidelines that the FSA has officially recognized. These all refer to satisfying MiFID requirements, represent work product from the British legal firm Clifford Chance, and address Outsourcing, Suitability and Appropriateness criteria, and Investment Research, respectively.