How is it that we get a major insider trading scandal every two decades or so? The last big one, which ultimately ensnarled Michael Milken, the legendary junk bond king, happened in the late eighties. The current one, with a mass of arrests yesterday, threatens the hedge fund industry.

Brett Favre, the aging 40-year-old quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings football team, proved to the rest of us Sunday that getting older doesn’t mean you’re losing it. To the contrary, demonstrating that novelist Thomas Wolfe was wrong in his belief that you can’t go home again, the supposedly washed-up quarterback hurled four touchdowns to lead the Vikings to an impressive win over his former team, the Green Bay Packers. It reminded me of another old geezer, Richard Russell, the 85-year-old editor of Dow Theory Letters, a well-regarded investment newsletter out of La Jolla, Ca., and a recent critically acclaimed film, No Country for Old Men .


 
 Most financial advisers can relate to the challenges of handling smaller accounts that are inherited from the relatives of existing clients, or are in the form of small “orphaned” retirement accounts. For an adviser with a client account minimum of $500,000 or more, a $50,000 account can add up to more work than it’s worth. One solution gaining popularity is the shared-trust route to consolidating smaller accounts into a publicly traded registered mutual fund


 
 Alternative asset manager Fortress Investment Group LLC said Friday its third-quarter loss deepened as it cut expenses and recorded a big gain on affiliate investments. For the three months ended Sept.

It may be the most direct apology of the financial crisis. Former Citigroup chairman and CEO, John Reed, has apologized to a Bloomberg reporter for his role in creating the ailing mega-bank, which has received $45 billion bailout funds and more than $300 billion in asset guarantees. In other words, Reed, is essentially saying, sorry about that whole “too big to fail” thing

Cross-posted from Harvard Business Online There’s a common saying that you never pay attention to your electricity provider unless the lights don’t come on. Well, it’s the same thing with the various regulatory systems throughout the world. For the most part, they tend to be invisible, unless there’s a problem.


 
 A Florida yacht broker has been sentenced to two months in prison for a tax conviction stemming from the U.S. investigation of secret accounts at Swiss bank UBS AG.