The funds are not in a position to meet these requests, given that they do not have the liquid assets and will not have them for months, or even years, since gathering that amount of assets would require them to put property on the market.
This was the era when a Labour chancellor, Gordon Brown, could give a speech to a gathering of bankers and asset managers and tell them: "The financial services sector in Britain, and the City of London at the centre of it, is a great example of a highly skilled, high value-added, talent-driven industry that shows how we can excel in a world of global competition.
While many brokers claim to offer guidance on these issues, their advice is conflicted and often a pretense for their overriding goal of gathering assets.
It is the cost of gathering those assets.
It's not just weak performance that is hurting Merrill's asset management business; it's the cost of gathering those assets.
When Morey spent much of 2012-13 gassetsng assets as if it were an episode of A&E's Hoarders, he came out of the season with notables James Harden, Jeremy Lin and his coup de grace from the Lakers, Dwight Howard.
The moves are part of a broader rethinking by USA Today's parent company, Gannett, to consolidate the news gathering of its TV and newspaper assets.
After a decade of concentrating on gathering customer assets without keeping a sharp on eye on costs, Merrill is under pressure from shareholders to show that its brokerage business can slim down and become more profitable.
In a series of deals, Chesapeake agreed to sell its holdings in Chesapeake Midstream Partners for $2 billion and some midcontinent gathering and processing assets of CMP and all of its interests in a subsidiary, Chesapeake Midstream Development, for another $2 billion.
THE planned opening session at a big hedge-fund gathering in Bermuda this week had been entitled: How to Handle the Flood of Assets Coming In.
Noble will also pay $160 million for Consol's existing wells and $59 million for half of Consol's gathering assets.
