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The market clout of the indexers raises other questions too. The actual owners of the stocks--not the index-fund managers but the people putting money into index funds--have little say over the companies they own. Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street, not Mom and Dad, vote in shareholder elections. As John Coates, the Harvard professor, notes: "For the most valuable public company in the world, three individuals can in principle swing the vote of 17 percent of its shares. Generally, a significant fraction of shareholders do not vote, even if in contested battles. As a result, the 17 percent actually represents more like 25 percent or more of the likely votes in contested votes. That share of the vote will generally be pivotal." In fact, the Big Three cast roughly 25 percent of the votes in S&P 500 companies.

Another worry is that these firms are too passive rather than too powerful. They are committed to being as lean and hands-off as possible, in order to reduce their fees. They do not tend to get involved in shareholder actions or small-bore corporate management, perhaps in part because any one company doing well against its peers is not of interest to the indexers, who want more assets under management and higher corporate profits.

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The effect on the real economy might look a lot like that of rising corporate concentration. And the two phenomena might be catalyzing one another, as index investing increases the number of mergers and makes them more lucrative.

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Just last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on whether BlackRock, with its $9 trillion in assets under management, is too big to fail. The Federal Trade Commission is contemplating whether the big index-fund families pose antitrust concerns. Government watchdogs have raised alarm bells about the revolving door, as the Biden administration continues to draw officials from the Big Three. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the chief executive officer of State Street said he thought it was "almost inevitable, when you see this kind of concentration, that it probably will make sense to do something about it."

All this growth has some investment firms concerned. Data from the firm Accelerate shows SPACs are trading at a significant premium to their net asset value.

The firm said in a February 24 report that "SPAC NAV premiums remain disconcerting" and noted SPAC NAV premiums reached 26.9% in February before dropping to 20.9% after the SPAC market went through a correction.

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The Chairman of the world's premier securities regulator evidently is unaware a decade-plus of private equity investing by so-called "well-managed" pensions has resulted in increasingly disappointing, not to mention inflated and unauditable performance results. Warren Buffett, arguably the world's most respected investor, recently escalated his criticism of private equity firms.

At last year's Berkshire Hathaway BRK.B annual meeting Buffett stated, "We have seen a number of proposals from private equity firms where the returns are not calculated in a manner that I would regard as honest... If I were running a pension fund, I would be very careful about what was being offered to me."

Chairman Clayton and DOL may think they know more about the risks and rewards of private equity investing than Buffett. They don't.

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Elliott, founded by billionaire Paul Singer, did not disclose the size of its stake in SoftBank nor specific steps it wants the company to take.

However, The Wall Street Journal reported that the investment amounts to more than $2.5 billion, or around 3% of SoftBank's entire market value. The paper said Elliott is pushing for up to $20 billion in share buybacks and improvements in SoftBank's corporate governance.

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In some ways, the tables have turned on SoftBank, which has long wielded vast power through its mega tech fund. Now, SoftBank is the one under pressure by a well-heeled investor.

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A dozen real estate professionals told ProPublica they saw no clear explanation for multiple inconsistencies in the documents. The discrepancies are "versions of fraud," said Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. "This kind of stuff is not OK."

Last week The Real Deal reported that private equity group Blackstone was "warehousing" vacated apartments and that the issue had prompted the city's housing preservation and development to review its 2015 regulatory agreement with the landlord. As part of that landmark deal, the city provided the owner with $220 million in subsidies, and in return, Blackstone agreed to keep 5,000 of the roughly 11,200 units affordable for a 20-year-span ending in 2035.

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State Assemblymember Harvey Epstein, who represents Stuy Town's district, said he had asked Blackstone about the units and said there was nothing illegal about its actions. He said he believed Blackstone officials were weighing the risk of waiting--perhaps in the hope of a change to the rent laws--versus renting the units now.

"They are making an economic calculation," he said. Nevertheless, he said that given the affordable housing crisis, the city should not allow landlords to keep units off the market.  

Cruise travel from the U.S. to Cuba began in May 2016 during President Barack Obama's opening with the island. It has become the most popular form of U.S. leisure travel to the island, bringing 142,721 people in the first four months of the year, a more than 300% increase over the same period last year. For travelers confused about the thicket of federal regulations governing travel to Cuba, cruises offered a simple, one-stop, guaranteed-legal way to travel.

That now appears to be over.

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Collin Laverty, head of Cuba Educational Travel, one of the largest Cuba travel companies in the U.S., called the new measures "political grandstanding aimed at Florida in the run up to the 2020 elections."

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he warned that "it's the longer term that we're more concerned about now given the technical breakdown we've seen. Expect a rally soon, but don't go loading up on cyclicals with the expectation that the pain is over once we bounce. There is likely more volatility to come in the weeks ahead."

The acquisition could help the San Francisco-based exchange extend its offerings and subsequently expand into non-crypto financial products. In the announcement, the company said it's looking to "work with regulators to tokenize existing types of securities," which the exchange believes will "democratize access to capital markets" for companies and investors in the industry.

"When you're cursed with all this debt, there's no way you can compete anymore," said Howard Davidowitz, a retail consultant who worked with Toys R Us in the 1980s and 1990s. "Now they're running up and down the halls trying to pick up the pieces, but there's no way around it: This is a very bad situation, and it will weaken the company forever."

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The Wayne, N.J.-based company was for decades the country's preeminent toy retailer, with a towering flagship in New York's Times Square and a ubiquitous icon, Geoffrey the Giraffe. In 2009, it purchased competitor FAO Schwarz but eventually closed its New York store on Fifth Avenue, citing high costs.

I may have been absent that day but since when were central banks given discretion to trade and speculate to such an extreme? How effective can they be at managing the risk of others?

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The Fed's 1913 charter needs immediate, drastic revision. And a transparent independent audit is essential, to include the Fed's activities in the physical gold, swaps and derivatives markets.

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Too big to fail, jail, bail or prosecute is simply too big to exist. Unregulated, systemic banking fraud, a lack of enforcement and failure to properly manage counterparty risk will soon cause the next collapse.

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"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Well, Einstein, here's a new theory: relatively speaking, the risk is 40% bigger than it was in 2008, bigger institutions, bigger transgressions, bigger fines. And this time, the central banks want a slice of the pie, making this an exponentially larger feeding frenzy that can only end with indigestion.

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And there's another thing: these earnings per share are heavily influenced by the share count. Companies have been on a huge borrowing binge over these years, fueled by historically low interest rates, and a big part of that borrowed money wasn't used to create new things, expand, invest, or invent, but to buy back their own shares.

The new fund, named Apollo Investment Fund IX, L.P., will reportedly invest in North American and Western European buyout opportunities. In the market only seven months, it significantly crested its original $23.5 billion hard cap and expects to amass $24.7 billion in total, the filing said. 

The new fund ranks as the largest private equity vehicle ever raised, besting Blackstone's $21.7 billion pool that closed in 2007... Fund IX comes in a year likely to smash the previous $249 billion fundraising record set in 2007

Does this... um... look peaky to anyone else?

Maybe even worse, sales guidance for the quarter wasn't all that strong either, with mid-point guidance of only 24%. Clearly, the Prime Day event stole sales from the rest of the month versus generating a boost to revenues for the quarter.

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The key investor takeaway is that Amazon is the FANG stock that doesn't belong with the others. The ugly Q3 guidance should dent the stock for a while, but the market will probably brush off the weakness heading into Q4. The stock really isn't appealing at any price, but the momentum play likely remains intact, though much better opportunities exist elsewhere.

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Levin, who began working at Och-Ziff in 2006, is a largely unknown quantity beyond the firm's immediate universe. But he has a reputation there for something of a golden touch. His rise started in the aftermath of the financial crisis, as he persuaded the man who's now his co-CIO, David Windreich, to gamble on the rubbles of structured credit assets tied to the U.S. housing market and, later, on similarly roughed up securities in Europe, including Spanish regional debt that paid off.

The firm's main credit fund has turned in average gains of 13 percent since its 2011 inception, including an 18 percent return last year that made it one of the top performing funds in the industry. Back in 2012, credit trades guided by Levin notched $2 billion, accounting for more than half of the firm's total gains that year. The credit unit was pulling in such outsize returns that Levin was named global head of credit in 2013.

That growth, in fairness, came in the middle of a bull market -- junk-rated corporate bonds, for example, have returned more than 185 percent since the end of 2008 -- that lifted all credit assets for an extraordinary run, so much so that it can be argued it would've been hard not to make a lot of money.

"Was it luck? I don't know, maybe, I'm not sure it really matters," said Mike Rosen, chief investment officer at Angeles Investment Advisors, who has put money into Och-Ziff's credit-opportunities fund. "I do want to invest in lucky people -- that's better than investing with unlucky people."

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Och and Levin met when Levin was a counselor and water-skiing coach at a camp in Wisconsin where Och's children spent part of their summer. At first, Och sidestepped the younger man's pleas for a job at the hedge fund. After graduating from Harvard University with a degree in computer science, Levin worked for Sagamore Hill Capital Management and then Dune Capital, the now defunct hedge fund founded by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Och finally hired Levin as a distressed analyst.

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The company formerly was publicly held, but it went private in 2013 when it was acquired by TowerBrook Capital for $835 million.

Also starting in 2013, True Religion "began experiencing declining sales caused by the general trend of consumers [moving] away from traditional retail to online shopping," Dalibor Snyder, True Religion's chief financial officer, said in a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, where the company filed its Chapter 11 petition.

Payless was founded in the 1950s as a no-frills destination for fashionable shoes at affordable prices. However, in recent years it has suffered from flat and declining sales and a staggering amount of debt, as shoppers shun malls and instead opt for online or other discount stores. In 2012, Payless was purchased by several private equity companies as part of a $2 billion buyout of its parent company.

The retailer said it has entered into an agreement to reduce its existing debt load by almost 50%. It has also negotiated up to $385 million of debtor-in-possession financing from existing lenders to help it keep the business running and successfully emerge from bankruptcy.

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Revenues slid 4% to $2.3 billion in the twelve months ending in October 2016, according to Moody's.

Payless said it is also pursuing bankruptcy so that it can invest in areas that it believes will deliver growth, like expanding in places like Latin America, bolstering its online presence and shaking up its product offerings.