This sugar pill is quite hard to swallow

Talk about trying to make lemonade out of lemons. On Wednesday, two days after the Securities and…

Talk about trying to make lemonade out of lemons.
On Wednesday, two days after the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Sentinel Management Group Inc. in Northbrook, Ill., of fraud, Sentinel Asset Management Inc., an unrelated mutual fund company in Montpelier, Vt., issued a press release touting how it had used “news reports of a company with a similar name as an opportunity to trumpet its own successes.”
“We’ve had a lot of people call who were sure it wasn’t us but wanted to make sure,” Christian W. Thwaites, chief executive of Sentinel Asset Management, said in that release.
Mr. Thwaites, who apparently has a sweet tooth, goes on to talk about how “incredibly proud” he is of the performance of Sentinel’s funds.
“For some time now, we have been saying to the investment community, ‘View us as a premier investment manager, benchmark us and show us against some of the best investment managers in the industry,’” added Mr. Thwaites, who just may want to have his sugar checked.

From boom to gloom
For Countrywide Financial Corp. chief executive Angelo Mozilo, home is where the trouble is.
On Thursday, the head of the nation’s biggest mortgage lender said the U.S. housing market will likely lead the country into recession. “I’ve seen this movie before, and the ending of the movie always ends up in some form of recession,” he reportedly said. “I can see the economy slowing down substantially enough to give the regulators, the Fed, some pause in what’s going to happen next.”
Mr. Mozilo called on the Bush Administration and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to make clear their intentions to keep the housing market from spinning out of control.
His comments came one day after Bank of America Corp. in Charlotte, N.C., said that it would invest $2 billion in Calabasas, Calif-Countrywide, which faced a credit shortage earlier this month as mortgage defaults rose, and capital markets tightened.
While Bank of America’s investment served as a “vote of confidence” and a “priceless endorsement,” the housing market and the economy still face difficult times ahead, Mr. Mozilo said.

Subprime shutdown
The subprime-mortgage meltdown is far from being over.
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., a leader in packaging subprime mortgages into securities, Wednesday announced plans to shutter its BNC Mortgage LLC home-lending unit.
The move will result in about 1,200 layoffs.
“Lehman Brothers announced [Wednesday] that market conditions have necessitated a substantial reduction in its resources and capacity in the subprime space,” the New York-based company said in a statement.
On the same day, the mortgage unit of London-based HSBC Holdings PLC said that it would close an office in Carmel, Ind., and lay off about 600 employees.
Over the past nine months, about 120 mortgage lenders have closed their doors or declared bankruptcy, according to Lehman.

Bank on it
What do young people want?
Apparently, it’s not contact with bankers.
A survey of 1,000 bank customers released by the based American Bankers Association in Washington found that while branch banking still ranked first among consumers overall, younger customers preferred their laptops.
In fact, only 25% of those under 34 said they used branches, while 30% said they banked primarily online.
Overall, branches were the choice of 36% of customers, online 23%, ATMs 21%, telephone 5% and mail 8%.