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ARS settlements galore, but corporate holders left in the lurch

Financial Week

While Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and UBS have said they will buy back a total of $36.7 billion in illiquid auction-rate securities, the settlement agreements focus mostly on retail investors. Those pacts leave serious questions for corporate money managers, many of whom still hold hundreds of millions of the illiquid securities. Citi, for example, said in […]

School daze

The Deal

Three years ago, an obscure Chicago-based home mortgage lender called Capital Assurance Group decided to tap the student loan market. It hired veterans in educational lending, changed its name to FinanSure LLC and unveiled various products designed to grab a chunk of the $100 billion market in loans for post-secondary education. By early 2007, FinanSure […]

Finra Alters Auction-Rate Dispute Process

Dow Jones Newswires

Securities regulators have created a special process for resolving claims related to auction-rate securities, a move that was welcomed by some who have been pressing for change in the arbitration process. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a non-governmental regulator for securities brokers and dealers, said Thursday that qualifying investors will have the option of having […]

Merrill Lynch analysts backed debt, complaint says

Bloomberg

Four days before Merrill Lynch & Co. stopped supporting the auction-rate securities market and left thousands of individual investors stuck with securities they couldn’t sell, the firm’s analysts recommended clients buy. “Reports of the imminent demise of the auction market seem to be greatly exaggerated, again,” analyst Kevin Conery wrote in a Feb. 8 research […]

Arbitration Tilting More Against Investors

Bloomberg

Let’s say you had $50,000 in auction- rate securities that your broker said were as safe as money- market funds. The market collapsed and you sold at an 80 percent haircut. At your arbitration hearing, one of the three panel members works at a firm that also sold auction rates deceptively. How fair will the […]