Institutional Investors

The Ravens are scheduled tomorrow to finalize a complex financial restructuring in which the team will take on $185 million in debt and shift majority ownership -- but not control -- from Art Modell to his wife, Pat.NFL rules limit the amount of debt that a team owner can take on using the club as collateral. The rules, however, do not prohibit a minority investor from borrowing liberally against his or her holdings.So Modell, working to pay off debts from Cleveland, buy out two Ohio-based minority partners and pay the considerable bills from his move of the franchise to Baltimore last year, transferred ownership of 70 percent of the team to his wife of 28 years.

Spiders and vipers and qubes - oh my. It's a jungle out there in the world of exchange-traded funds, and it's about to get more crowded. The first ETF roared onto the market in 1993 when the American Stock Exchange created the Standard & Poor's Depository Receipts trust, or SPDR, to mirror the S&P 500. Since then, more than 150 ETFs have been created, with about $211 billion in invested assets, according to the Investment Company Institute, an association of...

Jeff Stone is courting an entirely new crowd of well-heeled customers these days. All sales should be this easy.Stone, the president of Tweeter Home Entertainment Group of Canton, Mass., knows all about pitching customers on high-end consumer electronics.Now Tweeter itself is a darling to institutional investors with huge sums to invest and a powerful appetite for retail stocks. Their interest has helped Tweeter stock to more than triple in five months. Mutual fund managers and other big investors began buying retail stocks in volume two years ago, starting with large, well-known names such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Dayton Hudson Corp.

IF YOU are looking for the most interesting fallout from the mutual fund scandals of the past year, don't go looking in old headlines. Look instead at some fairly new court cases. Plaintiffs attorneys jumped on Putnam Investments in May and Fidelity Investments in July, alleging that the money management firms were making excessive profits through "egregious price-gouging" because the firms charge ordinary customers one price but give huge discounts to big institutional investors for the same services.

NEW YORK -- Last month the nation's financial markets went off on a wild roller-coaster ride, leading many analysts to wonder if the Nineties bull market was coming to a grinding halt.Mutual funds and investors began to withdraw their holdings. Securities issued by underachieving high-tech companies were hit especially hard, and news that a package bomb was probably responsible for the crash TWA Flight 800 did nothing to reassure owners of jittery transportation stocks.So, is the market about to collapse?

Scrambling to respond to the mammoth accounting scandal unfolding at WorldCom Inc., a congressional committee demanded to hear testimony from top current and former executives of the telecommunications giant, as well as a stock analyst who had long served as the company's most vocal booster. The House Financial Services Committee's action came as President Bush and other administration officials fretted publicly yesterday that the recent spate of corporate accounting scandals could pose a threat to the nation's economy.

THE SITUATION sounds familiar. Financial institutions with state charters have depositors' money insured by a private corporation. They fight efforts to switch to the "full faith and credit" protection of federal insurance. It's not needed, they say. Everything is fine just the way it is.That's what we heard in the 1980s from the state's savings and loan operators, who schemed and manipulated their way into a huge scandal that saw dozens of local thrifts declared insolvent, S&L officials and owners sent to prison, taxpayers forced to ante up $100 million and depositors deprived of their money for as long as four years.

PHILADELPHIA -- Conrail stockholders, clearly looking for the most money, yesterday emphatically rejected a proposal that would have allowed CSX Corp. to proceed with its takeover of the huge railroad.Voting for the first time in the heated takeover fight, Conrail shareholders defeated a plan proposed by Conrail's board of directors to "opt out" of a Pennsylvania law that prohibits two-tiered takeover offers such as CSX's $104 a share cash-and-stock, or $9.3 billion, deal.The outcome was a victory for Norfolk Southern Corp.

As Congress prepares to consider legislation capping credit card interest rates next week, banks said yesterday that the measure would worsen the "credit crunch" by eliminating a key technique they use to boost their balance sheets.The lower interest rate, banks said, probably would preclude them from selling credit card-backed securities, a practice that dates only to the mid-1980s.Banks pool their credit card accounts and sell them as securities to institutional investors such as trust funds, insurance companies and mutual funds.

Federal regulators are poised to offer much-anticipated rules on shareholder-nominated candidates for corporate boards, but some investors say they fear the plan could impose too many impediments. The Securities and Exchange Commission is scheduled to meet tomorrow to debate a formal rule proposal to give shareholders access, in certain cases, to company proxy materials so they can put forward candidates to challenge management nominees for the board of directors. The SEC has debated several times over the years a way to modify the usual system of mere shareholder ratification of management candidates, but this is the furthest it has advanced.