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As Baby Boomers begin to retire and sell out of stocks, the willingness of a counter-party to buy those securities will be critical to the price they will command—and the well-being of those Boomers in retirement, The Sacramento Bee reports.

Denver-based Old Mutual Capital launched a new website for its financial advisers and individual investors designed to offer quick access to investment and product information.

One of the top specialty fund categories in the second quarter was natural resources funds, rising 14%. So far this year, they are up 21%, the Associated Press reports. China funds rose 21% and Latin American funds delivered 20% in the quarter.

Chinese regulators are about to approve four additional equity funds, in an attempt to boost institutional holdings, Reuters reports.

Asset manager merger and acquisition deals were up a record 30% from the same period last year, according to MarketWatch. In the first half of this year, Putnam Lovell NBF Securities, recorded 112 M&A deals, compared to 86 deals in the first six months of 2006.

Michael Berger, whose hedge fund went bust in January 2000 and lost $400 million and who has been a fugitive since March 2002, was caught and arrested in Austria last week, according to Reuters.

Hedge fund companies Haidar Capital Management and Haidar Capital Advisors, along with their over, Said Haidar, have settled mutual fund trading charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission with a fine of $4.58 million. Haidar and his companies, however, neither admitted to nor denied the charges.

A retirement guide for women that the Heinz Family Philanthropies and the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement issued last week brought to light some startling facts.

In the thicket of Democrats running for the White House, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson outlined some of his tax and economic ideas for BusinessWeek. Among them, Richardson called for a national pension system to replace Social Security akin to a 401(k) that would be portable as workers moved from job to job, he said. When it comes to keeping cuts to the dividend and capital gains takes, Richardson’s answers are somewhat ambivalent. As for capital gains tax, which went from 20% to 15% in 2003, but is scheduled to be revised again in 2010, Richardson said he’d push to keep it. “I'm a pro-growth Democrat,” Richardson said. “As President, I would use the tax code to incentivize the economy. I would give tax incentives to companies that pay over the prevailing wage, to technology startups, to companies that move into rural areas. I would try to get tax simplification, tax fairness. I would increase tax incentives for the middle class.” But keeping the 15% rate for dividends, which were taxed at 35% before the 2003 law, might be a different story. “I would look at all the Bush tax cuts but not make them permanent. I believe we have to shift them to the middle class,” he said. The staff of Money Management Executive ("MME") has prepared these capsule summaries based on reports published by the news sources to which they are attributed. Those news sources are not associated with MME, and have not prepared, sponsored, endorsed, or approved these summaries.

Scandals will forever plague the financial industry, and the next big ones will probably involve brokerage activities and proprietary trading, according to BusinessWeek. Investment firms have made a lot of money trading for their own accounts, and many now have prime brokerage businesses, which process trades for hedge funds, and are extremely profitable. A practice known as front running, which involves trading ahead of big buy and sell orders to profit unfairly from the ensuing ups and downs in prices, is making waves in the industry. There are worries that prime brokers are tipping off their own traders about large mutual fund orders, and their hedge fund clients as well. In return for the information, banks receive instant easy trading profits and sometimes cash payments right away from hedge funds. Mutual funds suffer from the scheme by buying stocks at higher prices or selling as lower ones then they should have. Regulators have been slow to react to the growing problem, but front running is very hard to prove. “It’s a gray world,” says New York University Professor Lawrence White, but cooperating to protect high prices and fees is where regulators and plaintiffs are ready to pounce.” There are other types of schemes that are just as shady, such as short-sellers, who often conspire to horde a company to drive down its stock. Examining the Street’s response to the near closing of two Bear Stearns’ hedge funds demonstrates that conspiracy takes place, and is continuously changing in ways that challenges black-or-white judgments. Bear Stearns’ situation is murky. Banks have incentives to keep each other up and running and prevent a systemic rundown. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America all agreed to help Bear and settled their losses without forcing a liquidation of the fund’s assets, which would have hurt the subprime mortgage market even more. No matter what, collusion will always take place on Wall Street. When things get out of hand, a case will go to the Supreme Court, but by then it will be years too late. The staff of Money Management Executive ("MME") has prepared these capsule summaries based on reports published by the news sources to which they are attributed. Those news sources are not associated with MME, and have not prepared, sponsored, endorsed, or approved these summaries.