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With loan demand still weak in many areas of the country, more and more bankers are starting to believe that their banks will need to merge with other institutions to achieve meaningful growth.

In the battle over Dodd-Frank implementation, large U.S. banks may do well to remember the story of the boy who cried wolf.

Ever wonder how much it might cost to properly promote a book or one big initiative? Given the importance of either scenario, you may decide it makes sense to work with a PR firm. You have a lot at stake and should make the most of things.

Cohen & Steers, an asset manager specializing in real estate, predicts that U.S. REITs will boost dividends by 10% a year for the next five years.

Franklin Templeton Investments has launched the Templeton Frontier Markets Fund in Canada, which will invest at least 80% of its portfolio in 61 countries in the very early stages of development, such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Romania, Jordan, Tunisia, Columbia, Zambia, Paraguay and Kenya. International investing expert Mark Mobius will run the fund.

Fidelity Investments this week named Scott Couto as the new president of its Financial Advisor Solutions unit where he will oversee the firm's product suite, investment consulting services, product analysis and marketing endeavors.

Pyramis Global Advisors, Fidelity Investments’ institutional business, has established a cash management business in London to offer a suite of money market and other cash management solutions in the world’s major currencies.

UBS Investment Management has launched two ETRACs exchange-traded notes linked to the performance of the UBS Internet IPO Index, which is comprised of 20 social networking, Internet software and Internet services stocks that have gone public within the last three years.

Sixty-seven percent of America’s middle-income Baby Boomers expect that their retirement experience will be drastically different from their parents’, a survey by the Bankers Life and Casualty Company Center for a Secure Retirement found.

Americans’ outlook for the economy darkened in June, a Harris Interactive poll of 2,183 adults in mid July found. Thirty-one percent are afraid that the economy will worsen in the coming year, 41% don’t expect any improvement, and only 26% are hoping things will pick up in the coming year.

Federated Investors has completed its acquisition of $509 million in mutual fund assets covering equities, fixed income and money markets from EquiTrust Series Fund and EquiTrust Variable Insurance Series Fund.

There is a lot of concern among investors about the looming Aug. 2 debt ceiling crisis, with investors wondering whether they should take steps to protect their assets in the event of a major crisis such as soaring interest rates and a decline in bond prices or even a stock market crash.

SunAmerica Asset Management has launched the SunAmerica Global Trends Fund, a fund sub-advised by Wellington Management and that combines 10 global asset classes with a rules-based asset allocation strategy that seeks to move in and out of changing markets.

BlackRock said Thursday it is moving the production of its research on exchange-traded funds to a new unit and the long-timer producer of its "ETF Landscape" reports will be leaving the company.

Citing "regulations written for banking institutions," the insurance giant has put its $16 billion-asset depository on the block. MetLife, which ranks among the top 15 home lenders, would continue writing mortgages. But it would do so as part of the so-called shadow banking system.

On the one-year anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Act, Democratic lawmakers and key financial regulators called on Congress to resist Republican efforts to cut funding to implement and enforce the law's sweeping new regulations.

Given the low interest rates banks are paying on deposits these days, you might not think it’s much of a big deal that Thursday marks the end of an 80-year-old ban on banks paying interest on business accounts. But if you thought that, you are clearly not a financial advisor working at a bank.

After all the blood, sweat and tears that has gone into the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, a new survey revealed that almost half of all bankers do not think it will help prevent risks to the financial system.

Even if the politicians in Washington do manage to raise the debt ceiling, all the red ink and all the money printed by the Federal Reserve to prop up the economy over the past three years make it likely, according to some experts, that inflation could be on the rise and that reality has many investors understandably unnerved.

SunAmerica Asset Management has launched the SunAmerica Global Trends Fund, a fund sub-advised by Wellington Management and that combines 10 global asset classes with a rules-based asset allocation strategy that seeks to move in and out of changing markets. The fund will invest primarily in futures contracts and also use technical analysis. It will have between 0% and 10% exposure to each of the global asset classes.