Competitive Equity: Developing a Lower Cost Alternative to Mutual Funds

by Peter J. Wallison, Robert E. Litan

Mutual funds are a key resource for Americans saving for retirement, college, and other long-term goals. With hundreds of fund families and thousands of individual funds crowding the marketplace, competition would hardly seem an issue. Yet funds are failing to compete effectively on price. This is a serious problem for savers, because small price differences can deeply erode investment results over time. This book argues that the problem is not too little regulation, but too much and of the wrong kind. The authors show how current policy leads to de facto rate regulation and propose a new collective investment vehicle.

154 pages, Paperback

First published April 25, 2007

About the author

Peter J. Wallison is an American lawyer and the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He specializes in financial markets deregulation. He was White House Counsel during the Tower Commission's inquiry into the Iran Contra Affair. He was a dissenting member of the 2010 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, frequent commentator in the mass media on the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and wrote Hidden in Plain Sight (2015) about the crisis and its legacy.