Hampshire County Council’s pension fund stands to lose £7.1m tied up in an alleged $50bn fraud for which US trader Bernard Madoff is being investigated.
The council said the sum represents just 0.3% of its pension fund’s total assets of £2.4bn and there was no risk to any contributors.
US authorities have ordered the liquidation of Mr Madoff brokerage firm, after the case was discovered.
The council said its fund value had fallen from £3.1bn in October 2007.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox called for a probe of his agency, saying what he has learned about its investigations of Bernard Madoff before the investment manager confessed to operating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme is “deeply troubling.”
“Credible and specific allegations” were made to SEC staff going back to at least 1999, Cox said today in a statement. He asked the agency’s inspector general to lead a “full and immediate review” of the past claims against Madoff.

The German economy, Europe’s largest, contracted more than economists expected in the third quarter, pushing the nation into the worst recession in at least 12 years.
Gross domestic product dropped a seasonally adjusted 0.5 percent from the second quarter, when it fell 0.4 percent, the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said today. Economists expected a 0.2 percent decline, the median of 40 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey showed. The economy last contracted this much over two consecutive quarters — the technical definition of a recession — in 1996.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — As government and industry scrambled to stem the housing crisis, another 84,868 homes were lost to foreclosure in October, according to a report released Thursday.
Last month 279,561 struggling borrowers received foreclosure filings, including default notices, notices of auction sales and bank repossessions, according to RealtyTrac, an online marketplace for foreclosures. That’s a 5% increase from September, and up 25% from October 2007.

The revised bailout of American International Group Inc. marks a new phase in the government’s effort to shore up financial markets: It’s the first time cash from the rescue fund Congress created last month has been committed to a failing company.
The Federal Reserve, which saved the insurer from collapse two months ago with an $85 billion loan, yesterday reduced that loan and offered lower rates, while the Treasury chipped in $40 billion from its bank-rescue fund to buy preferred shares. The new terms represent a departure for Secretary Henry …

High Street banks have told Alistair Darling that they will not pass on any further interest rate cuts to consumers and businesses.
At an emergency meeting, bankers warned the chancellor that they were “not charities”. They said they could not afford further to reduce mortgage payments and interest rates to businesses if, as expected, the Bank of England continued to cut rates as the economy fell deeper into recession.

Asian and European leaders have come together in Beijing to discuss the ways to deal with the global financial crisis amid economic meltdown.
The 7th Asia-Europe Meeting known as ASEM, will be formally inaugurated this evening in the Chinese capital.
It is the first significant summit in Asia since bank failures, plunging stock markets and weakening currencies amplified fears that the world is headed for a prolonged economic decline.

Pavel Globa, a well-known astrologist, predicts that Russia will successfully extricate from the current financial crisis, although it is not going to happen soon. Russia, the astrologist said, will suffer a lot less in comparison with the United States and the European Union. The latter may even collapse, Globa said. The West will suffer from a major crisis in two years, which will subsequently result in the change of the world order.

The Mexican Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly approved an energy reform package designed to modernize the state-owned oil monopoly and boost declining production.
The seven measures, watered down from changes proposed by conservative President Felipe Calderon, won backing from the three main political parties in the Senate. Prospects appear good for passage in the lower house of Congress as early as next week.