SHORT INTERESTS: TIPS, TRENDS, OBSERVATIONS

Advice? It’s all mechanical

General Motors Corp. might think a mutual fund is the way to shore up its car biz, but Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of the popular public radio show “Car Talk,” are baffled.

On last week’s program, Click and Clack, as they are known to their weekly listeners, took GM’s idea for a new institutional fund to task. They mused that GMIMCo actually stands for General Motors Investment Milking Operation, rather than Investment Management Operation. And they accused the auto maker of stealing their idea, since the brothers have been managing capital depreciation funds for years.

“I think it’s funny that GM would be involved in mutual funds. I thought they made cars,” says Ray, taking a break from the Good News Garage, which he runs in Cambridge, Mass.

On second thought, he adds: “They’ve been making cars for so long, maybe they’re tired of making cars.”

He says he and his brother don’t know much about the asset management business, though they have retirement savings accounts. But their capital depreciation funds, which promise to return 50% of investor money irrespective of which way the stock market goes, have been in operation for years.

“We don’t have any investors yet, but we’re waiting,” Ray Magliozzi says.

What generation gap?

Kids may not agree with their parents a lot of the time, but when it comes to financial matters they apparently do. A recent survey found that American students aged 12 to 22 share their parents’ confidence that the economy will only get better.

The annual study by Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance Co. found that 50% of students say they expect to be wealthier than their parents, with college students anticipating an average annual starting salary of $38,000, up from $36,000 last year.

Good news for financial planners: Like their parents, the next generation lacks self-confidence when it comes to managing their own money, with only 20% of respondents saying they feel “very good” about it.

Bear with us

Investment advisers who put their clients in Beanie Babies instead of something more perishable and less liquid, like gold, are breathing a little easier since Ty Inc. hurled an anathema — and a lawsuit — at rival toy mammal manufacturer HolyBears Inc. of Humble, Texas.

Ty, owned by H. Ty Warner (estimated net worth: $5 billion), is taking no guff from wimpy bears bearing Bible-shaped tags with messages like “God bless Texas,” “Matrimony, the first union ordained by God” and “WWJD,” for “What would Jesus do?”

His lawyers have filed suit in federal court in Chicago for copyright infringement. They demand that the HolyBears, which sell for eight bucks at church fairs and in religious bookstores, be destroyed for causing “irreparable damage” to Fleece the sheep and the rest of the flock at the skilllionaire’s Oakbrook, Ill., company.

Rob LeClair, founder of HolyBears, is turning the other cheek, but not all the way: “Our bears are little messengers of God’s word and we will fight to protect them from destruction even as we pray for their aggressors.”

Who said Ty doesn’t have a prayer?