Regulation

Putnam Investments is cracking down on the perks brokers use to entice fund managers and other executives to give them their business.

Soft-dollar advocates are going to have a harder time pleading their case.

Board members beware. In addition to racking up a gargantuan $675 million settlement with Bank of America and FleetBoston Financial last week, regulators made it clear boards are fair game, as it ousted eight of the 10 directors of the beleaguered Nations Funds board.

The search is over.

The U.S. Attorney's office has filed criminal charges against three Mutuals.com executives, charging them with helping hedge funds deceive mutual fund companies by hiding their market-timing activities in separate accounts. Mutuals.com Chief Executive Officer Richard Sapio, President Eric McDonald and Chief Compliance Officer Michele Leftwich face up to five years in prison. This is the first time that federal, not state, regulators have filed criminal charges in the ongoing market-timing and late-trading investigation.

The SEC has formed a special committee to help determine whether 529 college savings plans offered through mutual fund companies and brokerage firms are overcharging investors.

Calpers, the nation's largest pension fund with $167 billion in assets, last week adopted a code of ethics for its outside money managers and consultants.

If advisers needed a go-go growth fund in the late 1990s, they probably turned to Janus Capital Group. Yet the aggressive strategy that Janus used to manage most of its funds ultimately backfired. After the tech bubble burst, the Janus name became a synonym for corporate management turmoil, manager exodus and vast fund outflows.

Will the growing number of settlements between disgraced fund companies and regulators put pressure on other fund advisors to slash fees, too? MFS, Putnam Investments, BoA and Alliance, the latter with a staggering 20% reduction over five years valued at a quarter of a billion dollars, have paved the way to what has become the industry's $64,000 question.

In his seminal book "The Right Stuff," Tom Wolfe wrote of those engineers and test pilots who believed in the 1940s that the sound barrier was a "brick wall" that would cause anyone who attempted to break it to "augur in" and "buy the farm." Chuck Yeager, of course, proved them to be wrong.