Money Management Executive Latest News

The national office of the AFL-CIO has persuaded money manager Waddell & Reed to join Edward Jones in withdrawing from a lobby group that supports President Bush's proposal to reform Social Security through private accounts, and now the organized labor giant has set its sights on Charles Schwab.

Bank of America Corp. will outsource back-office operations for $224 billion of assets to Boston-based State Street Corp. and Boston Financial Data Services, a joint venture of State Street and DST Systems.

Merrill Lynch has reached a $13.5 million joint settlement with state regulators and the New York Stock Exchange over charges that it failed to supervise a group of financial advisers who engaged in abusive market timing of the firm's mutual funds.

Putnam Investments announced investment management changes Friday in its Putnam Voyager Fund and Putnam Growth Opportunities Fund.

Fidelity Investments announced two moves last week that are expected to help the company re-capture market share, according to Morningstar columnist Russel Kinnel. The Boston-based fund giant said it will make its index-fund fee cuts permanent. It also said it would appoint two managers to run independent portions of its Mid-Cap Stock portfolio.

Shareholders should be careful before assuming that mutual fund mergers will necessarily translate into higher cost savings, some research analysts told The Associated Press.

Alan Greenspan foresees a surge in the U.S. savings rate, which could be good news for the mutual fund industry, but the Federal Reserve chairman's prediction isn't finding a lot of support among other leading economists and academics, a Bloomberg news report suggests.

In moving from regulator to in-house counsel at Bank of America, Cynthia Fornelli is navigating the very rigorous regulatory environment she helped to create at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Securities regulators in Illinois are pressuring Bear Stearns to turn over documents that contain proof of market-timing improprieties, it was reported last week. Illinois sent a notice to the firm on Feb. 10 asking its executives to appear before a hearing on April 6 to fess up as to why they failed to respond to a subpoena the month before. The state threatened Bear with a penalty and/or revocation of its state license.

On Sept. 3, 2003, Canary Capital came clean over its market-timing and late-trading abuses. Now, nineteen months, four days and billions of dollars in penalties later, regulators continue to uncover malfeasance in a scandal that never seems to end.