WEEK IN REVIEW

Squeaker in the House: Reform bill

In all the hullabaloo over the nation’s moving a step closer to having a First Intergalactic National State Bank, Trust, Insurance, Stock, Bond, Mutual Fund and Storm Door Holding Co. PLC, you might have missed how the bill passed the House of Representatives by a margin of one.

The key was the financial disclosure proposal (Editorial, Page 6) of Rep. Charles Dingell (D-Mich.). He rounded up 55 or 60 Democrats to vote for the legislation to knock down most of the 65-year-old walls separating banks from other financial services businesses. In return, the Republican leadership went along with his consumer protection plan, which has split financial planner organizations over the issue of requiring disclosure of fees and commissions.

The storm door industry, actually, would be beyond the threshold of new financial services leviathans, which would be banned from operating commercial businesses. They could keep the ones they have for 10 years, as long as they’re not too big — less than 15% of revenue.

The Federal Reserve Board would keep the reins on the holding companies, with holdees overseen by their current regulators.

It isn’t only the House that split, of course. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan thinks it’s a great idea, while Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who knows a thing or two about how the securities business works, may hold his breath until President Clinton vetoes the bill — if it clears the Senate.

Steady on

* Relax. No matter how good things look for the domestic economy, the Fed’s Open Market Committee won’t boost interest rates at tomorrow’s meeting. That’s the consensus of 36 experts surveyed by Bloomberg News. Asian turmoil will keep the lid on rates, they feel.

Less than mutual

* John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. is about to put its well-known signature on papers starting it down the slope toward public ownership. It’s joining Mutual of New York and Prudential Insurance Cos. of America in taking that route, rather than the rockier path to partial demutualization that New York Life Insurance Co. and Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. are trying to negotiate.

Big John is the nation’s ninth-largest life insurer and its 5 million policyholders could split as much as $10 billion in cash and stock. But that’s expected to be years away.

Quantum leap

* The best performer among emerging markets funds over the past five years, according to Standard & Poor’s Micropal, has been — drum roll, please, for a return of 184.26% — George Soros’s Quantum Emerging Growth Fund.

It beat the Morgan Stanley Capital International Emerging Markets Free Index, which offered 30.5%, and even topped the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index’s 166.6%. That’s more than any similar fund did. Next-best was the French FP Consult, with 139.81%. Capital International in Los Angeles was the only other U.S. company in the top five, at 90.72%.

Irrational exuberance?

* Matthew P. Fink, president of the Investment Company Institute, thinks investors ought to come down to earth. He told the fund trade group’s annual meeting in Washington, “In the interest of our shareholders, and in our own self-interest, we must do all that we can to see that investors have realistic expectations.”

Warren Buffet, singing from the same choirbook, said in an taped TV interview that “it takes a rosy scenario” to justify the current altitude of stock prices.

And the National Association for Business Economics chimes in that the stock market “appears overpriced at present.”

Summer IPO decision

* The 59 principals of Neuberger & Berman LLC, the $56 billion money manager, said they will decide by midsummer whether to take the New York company public.

Bloomberg News contributed to this report