| Sheelah Kolhatkar has a long profile of Pimco's Bill Gross, in which Gross makes an attempt to rationalize his somewhat erratic behavior over the last few months. (The front cover of the magazine uses the headline, "Am I really such a jerk?") Gross's strange behavior has been chronicled since Pimco CEO and co-chief investment officer Mohamed El-Erian, the heir to Gross's throne at the company, announced he was resigning from his post back in January. Then, in February, a devastating article in the WSJ painted Gross as a terrifying and brutal manager who referred to himself as Secretariat. Not long after the WSJ article came out, Gross told Reuters' Jenn Ablan, "I'm so sick of Mohamed trying to undermine me". He also "indicated he had been monitoring El-Erian's phone calls". Last week, Gross devoted much of his Investment Outlook letter to remembering his dead cat, Bob. The "Bond King" has been faltering of late. Gross's Total Return Fund, which fell 1.9% last year – its first down year since 1999 – trailed 95% of its peers and saw $3.1 billion of outflows in March. Which makes 11 straight months of outflows. In total, investors have pulled $52.1 billion from the fund since May. In recent months, Mercer, ING, and Columbia Management have all terminated relationships with Pimco. Behavior that is tolerated as eccentric when returns are good quickly becomes unacceptable when performance is poor. The problem, write Mark DeCambre and Matt Phillips, isn't Gross's behavior, but his returns: if they improve "any questions about Gross' personality quirks will almost certainly disappear". Felix says that Pimco's clients are overwhelmingly conservative fixed-income investors. While they like outperformance, "they're not shooting for the stars, and they hate taking unnecessary risks. Like, for instance, the risk that they've placed their billions in the hands of a cantankerous old man who always thinks that he's right and that everybody else is wrong". If assets do continue to leave Pimco, it would be great if the exodus continued on its current measured pace. In a recent speech, the Bank of England's Andy Haldane worried about the effect on the markets if investors all decided that they wanted to pull out their money at the same time. One problem, he said, is that investors are "becoming more fickle and run-prone". Shops like Pimco are what regulators like Haldane call "NBNI G-SIFIs": non-bank, non-insurer globally systemically important financial institutions. And they're operating, he says, in "a world of less liquid assets and runnier liabilities". – Shane Ferro On to today's links: Regulators
The SEC colluded with banks over CDO prosecutions - American Lawyer
"We can assume that the same nod-and-a-wink deal was struck with all the other one-and-only-one CDO bank prosecutions" - Felix The Fed
The paradox of transparency in monetary policy - Piera Charts
The history of global wealth - Vox Yikes
"Heartbleed is as bad as it is possible for a security flaw to be" - Rusty Foster Wonks
Thinking about Rawls in a Pickettian world - Chris Bertram
Paul Krugman's excellent review of Picketty - New York Review of Books Headline of the Day
"Live blog: Jeffrey Gundlach speaks about the market at yacht club" - Marketwatch Tax Arcana
Nobody can use this tax loophole anymore. It's too popular - WSJ Politicking
Paul Ryan's budgets cuts, and his problem with nominal dollars - Robert Greenstein Your Daily Outrage
Exorbitant fees cost low-income Americans up to a quarter of their tax refunds - NYT Profiles in Capital
New rules only succeed in shifting, not reducing, junior bankers' hours - DealBook | 
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