Securities and Exchange Commissioner Paul Atkins has warned against blaming hedge funds for the subprime market collapse and ensuing credit crunch.

Speaking to the French business school Edhec’s Risk and Asset Management Research Center, Atkins said it was instead important to “remember that hedge funds are likely to be an important part of the solution to the subprime crisis.”

“It does not seem that hedge funds were the origin of the subprime problems,” he said in an interview earlier this month. Those problems, however, revealed the “importance of robust valuation procedures,” he said.

In the wide-ranging interview, Atkins, who fiercely opposed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s efforts to register and regulate hedge funds, also touched upon self-regulatory efforts and shareholder activism.

“On both sides of the Atlantic, the industry is beginning to embrace self-regulation through, for example, the development of model codes of conduct,” he said. “These efforts should help to address the concerns underlying calls for greater regulatory intervention.”

But while he said his agency “can do little to control hedge fund risks, nor is it our role to do so,” he stressed the importance of regulatory cooperation, calling on Americans and Europeans to “learn from one another’s regulatory approaches.”

For activists, he had less kind words.

“Shareholder activists can play a valuable role in corporate governance, but one must be cognizant that certain shareholders may be championing corporate actions that are in their own best interest, and not the best interest of the corporation,” he said. “Hedge funds and other shareholder activists may have created a negative impression by pursuing their own self-serving agenda at times,” especially through the use of so-called “empty voting.”