Portfolio

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- A member of the President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers as the mortgage-led global credit crisis erupted said Monday that the last big weapon in the Federal Reserve Board’s arsenal to create strong growth is to avoid “tinkering around the edges” of the economy and aggressively reset expectations.

U.S. stocks gained ground Monday despite a troubling report that Standard & Poor’s would soon put “several” Eurozone countries on a “creditwatch negative” alert even though German and French officials said they had hammered out a European debt plan that would restrict future deficits without throwing the continent’s economy into a tailspin.

For the first time since the end of April, investors pulled more money out of exchange-traded funds and exchange-traded notes than they put in, resulting in a net outflow of $238 million for the month, according to the National Stock Exchange.

Unemployment among Americans without college educations is now in the mid-teens, says Goldman Sachs investment strategist Abby Joseph Cohen. But there are unrecognized strengths in exports and equities that should be recognized in investing in a recovery.

Fidelity Investments has filed with the SEC to offer a broad range of domestic and international equity and fixed-income exchange-traded funds – putting to rest longtime speculations as to when, not if, Fidelity would enter the ETF market.

Standard & Poor’s famously downgrades its rating of U.S. debt for the first time on Aug. 4. Investors pull out of equities and park their proceeds in ... U.S. Treasury bonds.

ProShares has created a new post, head of capital markets and named Stephen Sachs to the position.

The operators of the Hong Kong Exchanges are taking steps to enter the index business, toward creating benchmarks of the performance of stocks on mainland China and in emerging markets, such as Russia, Brazil, India and South Africa.

Since the financial crisis and Great Recession, 401(k) plans have undergone dramatic shifts. To foster diversification and greater participation, 51% of participants in Fidelity Investments' 401(k) plans are in automatically enrolled plans, up from 16% five years ago, and 73% of the plans use target-date funds as the default, up from 11% in 2006. In the past year, 64% of sponsors changed their investment lineup-up dramatically from 20% in 2008.

The State Street Investor Confidence Index rose two points in November to 97.2. In North America, the index rose 4.7 points to 95.2, and in Europe, it rose 5.4 points to 101.5. In Asia, however, the index fell 4.2 points to 94.6.