Van Kampen looks for closure
From TheStreet.com
In a proxy statement filed Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Van Kampen asked shareholders of its Global Government Securities, Global Managed Asset and Global Fixed Income funds to agree to close them, due to poor performance. The increased rate of redemptions from bond funds may mean that bond fund closures and mergers will be on the rise.

Mellon's misery
From The Wall Street Journal
"This is a Harvard Business School case on how to screw things up," is Mike Herman's assessment of Mellon Financial's handling of the fund families it has purchased. For example, Mellon bought Founders Funds in 1998. Within three months, Founders' widely respected chief executive was gone, and five of the seven stock-fund managers were gone within 18. Founders floundered as a result. In 1993, Mellon paid $1.45 billion for Boston Co., a respected trust bank and money manager. Within a year, the head of the $26 billion institutional money-management arm left, along with 20 of the firm's top managers. These problems may be the result of cultural differences between banks and mutual funds.

Protest filed for Schwab/US Trust
From The New York Times
The key issue in the passage of the financial services reform bill of 1999 was the Community Reinvestment Act, the ability of resulting financial services supermarkets to provide services, including loans, to even the poorest neighborhoods in areas in which they operate. Now the CRA is the issue again for the proposed Schwab/US Trust merger in a protest filed to the Federal Reserve Board by the Inner City Press/Community on the Move, a New York based group that frequently opposes bank mergers. Their position is that US Trust has an abysmal record of lending in poor neighborhoods. 

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