Allison Bisbey

The private-equity giant Carlyle Group agreed to acquire a majority stake in a Claren Road Asset Management, a $4.5 billion long-short hedge fund.

Investors in the world's largest credit market — the one for U.S. mortgage-backed securities — appear to be taking little damage so far from the foreclosure problems that have sapped leading underwriters and servicers of home loans.

The combined assets of the nation's mutual funds grew $486.2 billion in September, or 4.5%, to $11.267 trillion, as investors continued to add to long-term bond funds and pull money out of stock and money market portfolios, the Investment Company Institute has reported.

FrontPoint Partners' portfolio managers are taking back control of their hedge fund firm four years after they sold it to Morgan Stanley for around $400 million.

Wall Street's bond underwriting machine likely will remain busy in the final three months of this year and early next, say market analysts.

Fewer hedge funds closed their doors in the second quarter, but there were also fewer hedge fund launches, as investors continued to shun startups and smaller firms in favor of large, established players.

For many investors putting money to work in hedge funds, bigger is better, leaving some smaller asset management firms with little alternative but to merge with other funds.

Commercial mortgage securities issuance is still far below 2007 levels — five bonds pooling commercial property loans have come to market in the past six months — and the deals are dramatically different from those assembled before the credit crisis.

No one knows what housing market reform — especially the reshaping of the government-sponsored enterprises — will look like, but Wall Street certainly is paying close attention to its impact on a key source of fee income.

New rules curbing the amount of alternative investments banks can hold aren't the only thing driving private-equity spinoffs. Improving market conditions are also making it easier for investment professionals to strike out on their own.

When American Tower's senior unsecured debt was upgraded to investment-grade last year, the chief financial officer saw an opportunity to refinance some debt and slash debt-service costs.

Aite Group senior analyst Ron Shevlin thinks there's more to customizing web ads than just targeting customers with offers for products they're already using.

The Center for Plain Language gave its WonderMark award (as in “I wonder what they were thinking”) for unclear language to a letter Chase sent credit cardholders in February announcing changes to their accounts.

Bankruptcy experts at CreditSlips are blogging about the proposed process for authorizing the liquidation of systemically important financial companies.

A Congresswoman of Proven LeverageRep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., was a thorn in the banking industry's side long before her current fight to force leverage limits on big institutions. As a state senator, Speier wrote a landmark privacy law that forced banks to get customers' permission before selling personal information to third parties. Banks fought the legislation for years. When it was enacted in 2003, industry representatives predicted the law would end the world as we know it. (It didn't.)

Turns out American Banker's March 10 article on the record number of enforcement actions against banks wasn't the last word on the subject; and at least one community banker is unimpressed with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's defense of the central bank's oversight of holding companies and state banks.

Seems like there's something for everyone in Jamie Dimon's letter to JP Morgan Chase shareholders. (And at 37 pages, there should be.)

Maybe not, but saying something is better than saying nothing - especially when everyone else is talking about you.

Over at Reuters, Felix Salmon is touting another kinder, gentler version of overdraft protection that he says is standard in the U.K. There are no fees, just daily interest on the overdrawn amount. Salmon says U.K. banks treat this as a "negative balance" on customers' checking accounts. As a result, if you deposit more than that amount into your account, the overdraft automatically disappears.

Does overdraft protection have to be an all-or-nothing proposition?