•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   
•    EYEWITNESS   

Together they have 120 years experience in financial markets. John Bogle, 82, popularized index investing. Paul Volcker, 84, broke the back of 15 percent inflation as Federal Reserve chairman in the 1980s.

Today, they shared the same stage in New York and this view: confidence in the US financial system is broken.

Bogle, the founder of mutual fund company Vanguard Group who has spent his career advocating a low-cost approach to personal investing and railing against conflicts of interest in his industry, said he would grade the US financial system a ‘D’. Volcker, who has urged Congress to ban proprietary trading by commercial banks, said banks are lobbying to undermine financial regulation aimed at making the industry more stable.

“There’s no question that confidence in government is shaky,” Volcker, who’s a towering 201 centimeters tall, said at The John C. Bogle Legacy Forum hosted by Bloomberg Link in New York on Tuesday. Washington is “filled up with law firms that cover whole city blocks. Lobbying firms. And it’s all living off the influence of the government.”

The so-called Volcker rule seeks to stop regulated banks that receive support from the government from making risky bets with their own money. Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs Group have argued the limitations could harm capital markets by reducing the role of banks. The Dodd-Frank Act, the regulatory overhaul enacted in 2010, requires the rule be in place by July 21.

Bogle, whose influence on the fund industry was discussed at the event by more than a dozen figures from the fields of investing and finance, said he backed the Volcker rule and called for investors to focus on longer-term investing instead of short-term trading and chasing stock-market swings.

“Returns are not created in the stock market,” said Bogle, who suffered at least six heart attacks before a successful transplant in 1996. “The stock market is a giant distraction and investor confidence in active management is broken.”

He also said it’s impossible to have a bond market bubble because investors can expect to receive their money back when the bond matures. Buyers of Treasuries at the current low interest rates merely agree to a smaller return for the duration of the bond, he said.

Bogle, a Princeton University graduate, founded Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based Vanguard in 1974 and introduced the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, the first retail index mutual fund, two years later. His economics research at Princeton helped lay the groundwork for index mutual funds. When Bogle retired from Vanguard in 2000, the company established the Bogle Financial Markets Research Center.

Rather than relying on a manager to choose individual stocks or bonds in the hope of outperforming the market, the index fund simply bought most of the securities to closely track the Standard & Poor’s 500 and kept costs low.

The Vanguard 500 Index fund has $99.5 billion in assets. Vanguard index funds make up four of the 10 biggest stock and bond mutual funds in the United States, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The company, which oversees about $1.65 trillion, surpassed Boston’s Fidelity Investments in 2010 to become the largest mutual-fund manager.

David Swensen, who pioneered an investing style that helped endowments beat markets by using alternative assets such as private equity and real estate, said at the same conference that investors who don’t have access to top managers are best off using index products such as those promoted by Bogle.

Unless an investor has access to “incredibly high- qualified professionals,” they “should be 100 percent passive — that includes almost all individual investors and most institutional investors,” said Swensen, the chief investment officer of Yale University’s $19.4 billion endowment.

Bogle has also long criticized what he calls excessive executive compensation and the conflicts of interest that he says most money managers confront in pledging to maximize returns for clients and profits for company shareholders.

Bogle aimed to solve the potential conflict for Vanguard by setting up the company as a cooperative, owned by the funds it managed. The firm doesn’t distribute profits. It lowers fees when revenue grows faster than expenses, in effect returning excess proceeds to investors.

Bloomberg