Assets

First Mariner Bancorp said yesterday that net income rose six-fold to $151,342 in the first quarter, and assets, loans and deposits grew at a double-digit pace.The banking company earned 5 cents a share in the first quarter that ended March 31, compared with $24,076, or 1 cent a share, for the same period in 1997.First Mariner's earnings, however, fell short of analyst Collyn Bement's expectations by 2 cents a share."Everything still looks good," said Bement, who follows the company for Ferris, Baker Watts Inc. in Baltimore.

A jump in trust revenues and fees charged to consumers on their deposit accounts helped push First Maryland Bancorp's earnings up 11 percent in the second quarter to $32.5 million, the company said yesterday.First Maryland earned $62.6 million for the first half of the year, up 8.6 percent from the $57.7 million it earned in the first six months of 1995.But, unlike other large banks that have operations in Baltimore, First Maryland's assets and loans barely budged."Everyone else has been growing," said Alex Hart, a banking analyst with Ferris, Baker Watts Inc. "It is a bit troubling.

An article in yesterday's editions incorrectly reported the time for a hearing by the Maryland Insurance Administration on a proposed business consolidation between the Blue Cross plans of Maryland and the District of Columbia. The hearing will be 9: 30 a.m. Monday, Nov. 10, at 211 E. Madison St., Baltimore.The Sun regrets the error.WASHINGTON -- Regulators should impose restrictions on the proposed business consolidation between the Maryland and District of Columbia Blue Cross plans to preserve charitable assets in the event they convert to for-profit status, the representative of a consumer group said yesterday.

If the coffers suddenly doubled at your workplace, chances are you would be jumping up and down with glee. Then you'd start spending on your favorite projects.But at Baltimore's Annie E. Casey Foundation, where a $1.8 billion endowment grew on paper to $3.6 billion overnight this week thanks to the initial public offering of United Parcel Service stock, it was business as usual.The foundation's airy lobby and atrium on St. Paul Street, bathed in warm earth tones, fairly glowed with goodwill.

MOSCOW -- Ever since they bankrolled President Boris N. Yeltsin's re-election last summer, a clique of rich Russian businessmen has been amicably carving up among themselves the national assets they say they saved from communism.But not anymore.This summer, the capitalists have clashed over the spoils of a huge post-Soviet privatization program, sending shock waves through the Russian establishment. The coalition of millionaires and ministers that has been running Russia for a year is disintegrating.

LAKE FOREST, Ill. -- Mercury Finance Co., facing a widening financial crisis, suspended its quarterly dividend yesterday as Missouri regulators moved to protect the assets of Mercury's insurance unit.The company's shares fell 37.5 cents to $2.25 on heavy trading of 8.8 million shares. After trading in a narrow range most of the day, they fell in the final minutes of trading on word of Jayhawk Acceptance Corp.'s intent to seek bankruptcy protection. Both Mercury and Jayhawk finance car loans for borrowers with poor credit.

Baltimore Bancorp signed a "cease and desist" order yesterday with federal and state regulators that requires the lTC parent of the Bank of Baltimore to raise its capital ratios and lower the amount of troubled assets on its books.The agreement also sharply restricts the types of activities the company may undertake without regulatory approval.Executives at Baltimore Bancorp also followed up on their promise to repeat their profitable first-quarter performance by reporting a $5.8 million second-quarter profit.

Baltimore Bancorp plans to shrink by about 15 percent this year, as the parent of the Bank of Baltimore sells off $500 million in assets in a bid to boost the bank's sagging capital and cut its reliance on high-priced brokered deposits.The $500 million in asset sales will let the company pay off $450 million in brokered deposits -- usually in the form of certificates of deposit larger than $100,000 -- that the company's former management had used to fund a push into commercial real estate lending in the late 1980s, Chief Executive Charles H. Whittum Jr. said.

"I am on the brink of 60 -- unemployed with weak prospects for work in the near future," a California reader writes."When I became unemployed, we pulled out most of our funds from Vanguard -- i.e., Star, Wellington, Health, Windsor and Windsor II -- being afraid of the market and trying to preserve our capital."Now, the banks are paying less and less in interest, and we really do not know what to do to tide us over until I'm able to obtain work until 65 for Social Security."If you lost your job, would you find yourself in a similar situation?

CHONGQING, China -- As China continues to lurch toward its version of a market economy, officials are waking up to the fact they've been holding some of history's biggest bargain-basement sales.The sales involve the still valuable assets of China's often-failing state industries, which increasingly are being acquired on the cheap by private and foreign investors.In other cases, state assets simply have been siphoned off by local officials to finance local development. Some simply have been stolen.