When Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney-general, and William Galvin, Massachusetts' state regulator, started to poke around the trading practices of the mutual fund industry, the big players reacted resentfully. On Monday November 3rd, Lawrence Lasser was fired as chief executive of Putnam Investments following a probe into "market-timing." Market timing has been described as using frequent trading to take advantage of old prices. The same day, officials from the SEC, America's top securities regulator, told lawmakers in Washington that as many as one in ten top fund-management groups and more than a quarter of brokers may have allowed, or even encouraged, clients to engage in illegal "late trading". (New York Times)…
