Mutualfundreform.com

Today’s news that U.S. economic growth may not exceed 2% this year had an immediate effect on the stock market.  But how long does it take a nation to recover its GDP in a slow growth period? The U.S. economy grew at a less-than-forecast 2.8% in the fourth quarter 2011.  For the full year 2011, the economy expanded 1.7% and consumer spending grew 2.2%, according to U.S. Commerce Department data….

It has been one year since the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) delivered a report to Congress recommending the adoption of a universal fiduciary standard regulation that would apply to retail advisers and brokers. Now it looks like this long-overdue rule will not even be considered during 2012. The average person would think a year is enough time to consider the fiduciary question, especially since the ideas has been floated…

While they will not take effect until April 2012, the first changes from the new DOL disclosures have already emerged, months before the new rules are slated to become effective.

 “The U.S. job market is showing signs of a sustained recovery. But the country’s prolonged struggle with unemployment will leave scars that are likely to remain for years, if not generations.” –Ben Casselman, The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 9, 2012 While the prevailing mantra for the upcoming election is “job creation,” the better long-term goal may be the daunting task of replacing the trillions in lost wealth from the housing…

April 2012 will be a traumatic time for many 401(k) plans. That’s when 401(k) plans will be forced to disclose the fees they pay to their plan administrators.  For many plans, this will not be easy.  Like a low tide, it will show which plans are well managed and which have been wasting their money on unnecessary services that increased plan costs and wasted corporate funds.

Millions of American investors lost many billions of dollars or more as a result of the 2008 mass housing and financial frauds. But very few people have taken the time to investigate why they lost money and what the U.S. financial services industry did to help create the crisis in the first place or prevent it from happening.

Federal prosecutions fof certain financial crimes has reached a 20-year low, according to a new report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. 

Citigroup Inc. and Deutsche Bank have agreed to pay $165.5 million to settle federal regulators’ claims that they misled five failed credit unions about the risk of securities tied to mortgages. The National Credit Union Administration announced the settlements Monday over securities that the big Wall Street banks sold the five wholesale credit unions. After the five credit unions failed in 2009 and 2010, the federal agency seized them and liquidated…

The ongoing tug-of-war between all parties concerning financial services reform got some added dimensionfrom a report on CBS’s 60 Minutes about  legal insider trading involving the elected members of the U.S. Congress. The report found that trading on insider information involving stocks, IPOs and real estate-related legislation  which nets elected officials millions, yet is perfectly legal.  Those officials who were interviewed (and many refused interview requests) did not acknowledge that these trading patterns…

The 2008 financial crisis has assumed its role in economic and social history, and continues to get ongoing momentum from the severe recession it created, as well as the ongoing social protests.  Yet while there has been extensive analysis of the misdirected and Frankenstein financial engineering which precipitated the recession, not much is known about the types of people who helped create the current economic crisis in the first place….