Mutual fund managers skim fees

Title: FUND FEE FUROR
Source: The New York Post
Date: January 28, 2004

From the article:

"The mutual fund industry is indeed the world's largest skimming operation - a $7 trillion trough from which fund managers, brokers and other insiders are steadily siphoning off an excessive slice of the nation's household, college and retirement savings," Fitzgerald said in his opening statement at a Senate hearing yesterday.

Investment bankers, fund managers and a variety of other wall street professionals skim literally trillions of dollars off the money flowing through the markets. An article titled Ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S. puts it this way:

Everyone on Wall Street makes far too much for the backbreaking work of moving money around, but mutual fund managers are emerging as among the most reprehensible.

This isn't kicking 'em when they're down, given the growing fund-industry scandal. They've been long overpaid. Stock-fund managers can easily earn $500,000 to $1 million a year including bonuses -- even though only 3 in 10 beat the market in the last 10 years.

Now we discover an untold number enriched themselves and favored clients with illegally timed trades of fund shares. That's a worse betrayal of trust than the corporate scandals of recent years, since they're supposed to be on the little person's side.

Put aside what fund managers earn and consider their bosses. Putnam's ex-CEO Lawrence J. Lasser's income rivals the bloated pay package that sparked New York Stock Exchange President Dick Grasso's ouster. Lasser's take: An estimated total of $163 million over the last five years.

A massive concentration of wealth surrounds Wall Street.