Reuters – Australian investment bank Macquarie Group Ltd has managed to quell concerns on its capital position but is now bracing for its next big challenge of the global credit crisis: how to prevent its world-renowned specialist listed-funds model from crumbling.

Macquarie pioneered the specialist listed funds model in the early 1990s, encouraging even some Wall Street investment banks to follow suit. Fees from managing specialist funds made up 13.3 percent of Macquarie’s total income in the year to March 31, 2009.

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Tags: australian investment, capital position, credit-crisis, early-1990s, global-credit, investment-bank, investment-banks, macquarie group, renowned specialist, reuters, specialist funds, wall street, wall street investment

Baltimore Sun – If there is anything we have learned from the crisis in the financial sector, it’s the urgent need for more regulation. Had federal regulators been more vigilant or wielded greater powers, all this suffering and heartache might have been averted. That’s the story we’ve been told, and it must bring a rare smile to the face of Bernard Madoff.

Mr. Madoff was the manager of a Wall Street investment fund that he allegedly confessed to his sons was "one big lie" and "a giant Ponzi scheme." But "giant" fails to capture the scale of his fraud, which may have lost $50 billion, more than the entire gross domestic product of most of the countries on Earth.

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Tags: baltimore-sun, bernard madoff, big lie, earth, financial-sector, fraud, gross domestic product, investment-fund, ponzi scheme, regulators, smile, suffering, wall street, wall street investment