Mutual funds

Bank of America plans to sell its long-term asset management business, Columbia Management, to Ameriprise Financial for as much as $1.2 billion in an all-cash deal.

Beery, Charles to Lead Distribution at Janus

Analysts Bullish on Asset Managers' Earnings, Margins for Third Quarter

NEW YORK - Regulatory officials are pondering significant changes to the way the U.S. oversees financial markets in the wake of last year's credit crisis and the failure to prevent Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme, but lawmakers will have to make some hard choices before any real changes can happen.

At the Securities and Exchange Commission's roundtable last week on how to regulate the multi-trillion-dollar securities lending industry to avoid a repeat of the billions of dollars lost in the credit crisis, the focus was on conservative investment of cash collateral and a clearinghouse to create transparency, reduce spreads and keep stock pricing efficient.

NEW YORK - Despite their sinister-sounding name, dark pools of liquidity can be very beneficial to average investors by offering mutual funds and large institutional investors an efficient way to make large trades without impacting the market.

If there is anything positive to be gleaned from the financial crisis, it is that 401(k) plan designs need to be revised so they are more resistant to extreme volatility and market downturns, Putnam Investments CEO Robert L. Reynolds told executives at the National Investment Company Service Association’s East Coast Regional Meeting in Boston.

Invesco is in the running to acquire the fund business of Van Kampen, which has $550 billion of assets under management, and the deal could be valued anywhere between $1 billion and $2 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Invesco and TCW Group have raised more than $1.13 billion from private investors to buy toxic assets from the government as part of the Public-Private Investment Program, the Department of the Treasury indicated.

Robert McCann has settled his lawsuit with his former employer Bank of America/Merrill Lynch today, clearing the way for him to possibly head up the U.S. brokerage arm of UBS.

Standard & Poor’s has launched four securities lending indexes based on intermediary prices for stocks in its top three benchmark indexes, the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400 and S&P SmallCap 600, as well as the sector sub-indexes for the three indexes.

Jefferies Asset Management has introduced what it believes is the first commodities exchange-traded fund tied to an equities rather than a futures index, and it is planning other equities-based commodities ETFs in the near future.

“Move past the crisis,” Barclays Wealth urges investors in its latest monthly strategy update. It would be wise to position for the economic recovery since most economists are revising their growth forecasts for 2010 upwards.

After acquiring more than $1 trillion in asset-backed paper from money market funds, the Federal Reserve is considering borrowing that money back from the funds through reverse repos to ease the stimulus plan and avoid inflation, and most funds think that is a good idea.

Bank of America has reached an agreement to sell the long-term asset management unit of Columbia Management to Ameriprise Financial for $1 billion. The bank is still considering what to do with its short-term asset management business.

Expecting strong third-quarter earnings reports from asset management firms due to the market’s rally, analysts are upgrading their outlook on the companies.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is concerned about the additional risk investment firms take on when they put cash collateral earned from securities lending into other uses, along with the lack of true transparency in the market. Thus, the SEC will conduct a “wholesale review” of the entire securities lending marketplace in a roundtable on Tuesday.

As the Federal Reserve begins to ease its extraordinary stimulus plan and works to stave off inflation, it is reportedly considering borrowing up to $500 billion from the $3.4 trillion money market fund industry rather than the 20 leading primary dealers, which aren’t expected to be able to provide more than $100 billion, the Financial Times reports.

Morningstar has acquired a minority equity stake in PitchBook Data, a provider of data on private equity transactions, investors, companies, limited partners and service providers.

Rather than simply generate reports for portfolio managers to use, fund analysts at leading companies including Fidelity, Putnam and MFS are getting more say in which stocks a fund selects in funds they are labeling “sector” or “research” funds, The Wall Street Journal reports.