The company is still waiting for an exemption from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to take over the calculation of the indexes. Under the rules, an ETF cannot track an index owned by the parent company. WisdomTree and VanEck Global have special exemption status for some of their ETFs tracked by their own indexes, reports Richard Roberts for Investment Adviser.
For now, it’s business as usual, and Barclays has a temporary exemption to operate the indexes normally while the SEC decides.
There are 52 Lehman fixed income indexes. ETFs are based upon the Lehman indexes because the provider of these ETFs has licensed the Lehman index for its fixed income products in order to construct, manage, and maintain what goes into the ETF.
In a nutshell, Lehman just decides what to put in the index, and what happened to the firm is independent of them.