WEEK IN REVIEW

No Man is an Island ECN

The name of everybody’s old pal Robert E. (“You have a friend at First Jersey”) Brennan resurfaced with the resignation of Jeffrey A. Citron as top dog of Datek Online Holdings. The No. 4 online brokerage and Mr. Citron, the 29-year-old web wunderkind who owns 30% of it, are reported to be part of an investigation into Mr. Brennan, who has been banned from the securities industry for life.

Datek’s darling is, of course, Island ECN, which matches securities buyers and sellers directly.

The Edison, N.J., company’s board clearly wanted to do a Pontius Pilate on Mr. Citron, who in only 12 years rose from office boy to target of state and federal investigations into money laundering, illegal trading and bad bean-counting. A board spokesman said it was unaware of any investigation into a possible link with Mr. Brennan but was cooperating in other probes of its spun-off day trading unit. The company scrapped a plan to go public last year after the feds started nosing around.

New Jersey, by the way, asked a judge to make Mr. Brennan cough up the $45 million he owes it.

Alan comes through

Alan Greenspan is soooooo predictable. The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Open Market Committee didn’t raise interest rates, as everybody who is anybody knew he wouldn’t. He also knows how to dampen exuberance, whether rational or not: Announce that you’re leaning toward making money more expensive. That kept the lid on the stock pot,

letting the Dow Jones Industrial Average simmer rather than boiling past 11,000 again.

Another good sign, for inflation, that is, not anything else, is that the Index of Leading Economic Indicators (hereinafter known as I2) took a tumble in August for the first time in four months. It wasn’t much of a tumble, only 0.1%, but it came on the heels of 0.3 gains in each of the three previous months and probably means that higher interest rates are lowering the heat. I2 is designed to predict what’s going to happen in three to six months, in a general way, of course.

The Conference Board in Washington, which publishes I2, says the economy seems strong enough to keep growing through February. If it does so, that would make it the longest expansion in U.S. history, beating the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon February 1961-to-December 1969 Vietnam War expansion record. Bolstering the board’s optimism was the August factory order report: up a better-than-expected 1.3%.

Give me a T

The company that used to be Ma Bell is kicking around an idea to create tracking stocks in an effort to ring up some gains in its stock price. AT&T Corp., the former 19th century phone company, likes to think of itself as a 21st century cable and wireless outfit and is hurt that investors don’t see it that way. In fact, they’ve dumped more T than Bostonians ever thought of in their pre-Revolutionary party, sending the stock down 25%.

Now the talk is of issuing three tracking stocks, with no ownership, of course, following long distance, cable and wireless. The company’s board turned down a similar plan — but with ownership — last year.

Legal eaglese

Citigroup’s Citibank unit is being sued by a Texas woman charging that consumers paid hundreds of millions in over-the-top late credit card fees. Her lawyers, being no fools, are seeking class-action status. They charge that the bank’s gobbledygook instructions so flummoxed Visa card users that they missed payments. Citi wouldn’t comment, except to say such cases “hardly ever go anywhere”… State Farm policyholders won

$456 million in damages in an Illinois lawsuit that accused the nation’s biggest auto insurer of ordering body shops to repair damaged cars with substandard parts…Russian police raided Moscow’s Sobin Bank as U.S. prosecutors charged that $7 billion from Russia was laundered through Bank of New York Co. accounts. Heavy starch, please.