Special Program Root Tag

A U.S. hedge fund manager who has been a fugitive for over a year was found in Greece Tuesday, according to CNNMoney.com.

Although the bulk of the $2.5 trillion of money market fund assets are invested in Treasury bills, certificates of deposit and short-term commercial debt, money market funds have put $11 billion into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) backed by subprime mortgage loans this year, Bloomberg reports.

MetLife Investors, which distributes MetLife products to independent producers, has launched "Solving the Mystery of Lifetime Income," a marketing campaign designed to help financial professionals address their clients' need for retirement income.

The residential-housing market dropped first, followed by U.S. commercial-real estate stocks due to the spread of mortgage woes. Now investors are looking to invest in overseas properties, and some are looking at using exchange-traded funds, which can be a good or bad thing, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Despite the Federal Reserve’s attempt to restore order to the credit markets by cutting interest rates, investors are flocking to the safest government securities, prompting the largest drop in yields on short-term Treasury bills in almost 19 years, according to The Wall Street Journal.

As Fidelity Investments’ retirement services division struggles to expand its payroll and recordkeeping services, it appears the lack of success is a factor in the departure of five high-profile executives from the unit, the Boston Globe reports.Since last year, five senior executives have left Fidelity Employer Servcies Co. (Fesco), overseen by Abigail Johnson, the daughter of Fidelity Chairman and CEO Ned Johnson. The most notable departure was that of Jeffrey Carney, who stepped down in July as president of retirement services to join Bank of America.

Vanguard is requiring customers to have the same beneficiary noted on all their IRA accounts, and if not changed soon, the mutual fund giant will do it for them, according to Forbes.Vanguard sent out letters to 170,000 customers who had different beneficiaries on their multiple IRA accounts, stating they have to have identical beneficiaries for IRAs holding money rolled over from employer pension plans, traditional IRAs, both pretax and aftertax, and Roth IRAs.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Chicago-based Sentinel Management Group of fraud and misappropriation of clients’ assets, including using customers’ securities to obtain loans of up to $500 million, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Because Chinese financial regulations keep its markets largely insular—overseas investors cannot acquire domestic Chinese stocks and Chinese investors are greatly limited in what stocks they can buy overseas—its benchmark Shanghai Composite Index hasn’t been affected by the credit crisis affecting so many markets around the world, The Wall Street Journal reports.

In the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut short-term interest rates, it, no doubt, had millions of Americans in mind, as well as Wall Street, according to the Los Angeles Times.In the end, average Americans would also have gotten burned, had Wall Street endured an upheaval. The Fed is essentially bailing out everybody.

The absence of liquidity in the market is leading to some steep losses for highly leveraged hedge funds, according to The New York Times.

Fund companies continue to launch exchange-traded funds at an incredible rate. However, not all succeed in attracting enough assets to make them efficient investment products, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Investors have to weed out the ETFs that are genuinely useful to their portfolio.Unless an ETF has a large asset base and is actively traded, many investors are better off buying a comparable index mutual fund. In the first six months of this year, 162 ETFs were launched.

The Department of Labor estimates that automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans, as protected under the Pension Protection Act, will add between $45 billion to $90 billion a year to the plans, which had $3.6 trillion in assets under management in 2006, according to the Investment Company Institute.

While the market gyrations of the past couple of weeks have smarted, many financial advisers are telling their clients to remain with the, The Globe and Mail reports. In light of the fact that the markets have soared since 2003, many are simply calling the declines a market correction.

While TrimTabs reported that investors pulled the largest amount of money from the market in the week ended Wednesday, $19.86 billion, compared to the week after 9/11, when they took $16.5 billion off the table, the majority of the withdrawals are by large institutional investors, Dow Jones reports.

Although few economists believe there’s more than a 50% chance of a recession, the chorus of voices pointing to that possibility is growing, the Centre Daily Times reports.And there are three main factors that could cause that to happen, according to economists: how quickly banks resume readily granting consumers and businesses loans, whether housing prices continue to fall and whether the combination of those two factors puts the brakes on consumer spending.

The tumultuous debt market and concerns around the property markets are causing real estate mutual funds to take a beating, according to The Wall Street Journal.After seven year of remarkable gains, REITs are showing huge losses. Some funds are posting losses of 15% over just the past month.

The State Bank of India, India’s largest bank, is going to start to sell Fidelity mutual funds through its network of 9,500 branches, according to the Associated Press. The agreement was signed last week by Fidelity’s International’s Indian subsidiary.

Individual investors were surprised but grateful for the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut discount interest rates by 50 basis points to 5.75% last week, and mutual funds managers were just as pleased with the decision, according to Dow Jones.

TIAA-CREF has launched a new $50 million advertising campaign centered around a simple idea that it hopes will differentiate itself from other financial services companies: its dot-org status, The New York Times reports. In conjunction with this, it has also launched a new website, powerof.org.