SEC WANTS PAY TO PLAY TO GO AWAY

While Ms. Dow Jones Industrial Average’s coy response to the blandishments of Mr. 10,000 held the center ring, off in a Washington sideshow Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt came up with some real news.

He hopes to tackle something Capitol Hill and the White House have been unwilling even to touch: reforming at least a part of the way political candidates raise money.

“It’s time we move to put an end to the culture of pay to play in the area of municipal money management,” he told the Council of Institutional Investors. The SEC will consider a rule this month or next, Mr. Levitt explained, “to restrict how much money managers can give.”

Many of the politicians who determine who manages the more than $2 trillion in public employee pension funds see professional asset managers as geese eager to lay golden eggs.

In fact, Jon S. Corzine, the soon-to-be-unemployed co-chairman of Goldman Sachs Group LP and last week’s shining hope to keep a U.S. Senate seat for New Jersey’s Democrats, is somewhat tarnished by a similar issue. It was revealed that Mr. Corzine, a major Democratic contributor, was also instrumental in getting a piece of a $2 billion-plus state pension bond issue for Goldman, a bond issue opposed by his party and pushed by the likely GOP Senate candidate, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.

The SEC acted five years ago to restrict the amount of money bond underwriters can contribute to candidates, but they are still allowed to donate to political parties.

Short-term help

Getting out while the getting’s good, the 14 bailer-outers of Long-Term Capital Management LP announced a plan to retrieve some of their money from the firm this year. You remember the near panic its near collapse nearly caused last September, but now the hedge fund is back in the black.

Most of the deep-pocketed rescuers, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. and Chase Manhattan Corp., each chipped in $300 million and promised to keep Long-Term going for three years. They haven’t figured out how much to grab or what that means for John Meriwether, Myron Scholes and the other original partners.

Cruising along

Factory orders were down in February, thanks partly to a decline in civil aircraft demand. Things could be different next month, though, with the Air Force using up AGM-86C missiles in Yugoslavia at its current rate. If nobody’s buying 767s, Boeing Co. can always crank up its long-dormant cruise missile line to take up the slack. Meanwhile, it’s offering the Air Force 15% off on its C-17 cargo jets, bringing the price down to $149 million a pop, if the zoomies buy 60 of the big transports in the next decade.

Abe says ouch

Those cheapskates at Vanguard Group in Malvern, Pa., have squeezed another 0.01% from the expense ratio of their popular U.S. 500 Index Fund. That enables the $78 billion fund to match the lowest-expense Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index tracker, USAA’s mostly institutional $2.4 billion S&P 500 Index Fund, at 0.18%.

Help unwanted

Japan’s jobless rate hit a record 4.6% in February, meaning 3,000,000 were on the dole in the land of the lifetime job. That was before Mitsubishi Electric Corp. announced plans to fire another 14,000 over three years. The rate is about the same as in the United States, while euroland hopes to haul its jobless rate below 10% — not a typo — next year.

Tropical humor

All is not grim overseas. The Deccan Chronicle in Hyderabad, India, reported Thursday that India and Pakistan had created a common currency, the IndoPak, to take effect Jan. 1. After giving details of the exchange rate mechanism and so forth, the paper quoted the European Commission adviser as warning that Thursday was April Fool’s Day. Crow vindaloo, anyone?