While the growth in ETF markets is at an early stage in a number of countries, the speed and breadth of financial innovation in the ETF market has been remarkable in some large financial systems over the past five years, and has brought new elements of complexity and opacity into this standardised market. There are a number of disquieting developments in some market segments which call for closer scrutiny. ETFs have branched out to other asset classes (fixed-income, credit, emerging markets, commodities) where liquidity is typically thinner and transparency lower. The increased popularity of “synthetic” ETFs (which use derivatives) as.
