"The Cantor screen went blank immediately," said Paul Devlin, a proprietary bond trader for Fuji Securities in New York.
Salomon Brothers retained its independence until late 1997 when Mr. Weill, then chairman of Travelers Group, bought the firm for $9.2 billion, merged it with Smith Barney and started dismantling the proprietary bond trading group that had set Salomon apart.
Another German lender, WestLB, was forced to shrink by almost half and give up proprietary trading of stocks, bonds and options to get approval for the government funds.
The system, which would be the first proprietary trading system for bonds established in Japan since securities regulations there were relaxed a year ago, would be run by the E Bond Securities Company Ltd.
And unlike more risky pursuits like proprietary trading or structured products, bond trading does not require a significant outlay of capital.
The Better Markets study points to one frequently-cited estimate, that the "Volcker Rule," which prohibits banks from proprietary trading, could cost the bond market $315 billion in "liquidity" on its own.
The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, last week ordered Fannie Mae to use market values for the bonds instead of its proprietary estimates of their worth.
The Declaration identifies 5 types of financial and other interests that must be disclosed by all experts, including proprietary interests and patents, shares or bonds in a related commercial entity, employment or consultancies, paid work or research, and grants or fellowships from a commercial entity that has an interest in the subject-matter or work of the committee.
The most widely cited municipal bond yields are based on proprietary models, and individual investors have no way of learning what assumptions they are based on, why they give rise to different quotes or whether the prices are fair.
In America, a rule proposed by Paul Volcker, a former head of the Federal Reserve, will soon prevent deposit-taking banks from engaging in "proprietary trading" (in essence, investing in stocks, bonds and derivatives using its customers' money).
