The trading scheme uncovered at prominent hedge fund firm Galleon Group last month was widened Thursday to include a number of smaller, less known firms. But it also appears to touch a prominent firm.

The nation's largest pension fund, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, said it is investigating fees paid to an outside manager that directed the fund's investments.

Sponsors of defined benefit pension plans — the main retirement vehicle for millions of Americans — face "significant" pressure in the next year to keep the plans afloat, according to a study by one of the world's largest benefit consulting firms.

The American Academy of Actuaries, the public face of a behind-the-scenes profession, is in disarray after quietly sacking its incoming president, then trying to conceal both his ouster and an unpleasant secret from his past.

The government is looking closely at the pay of all top G.M. employees after bailing out the automaker. And that includes the unit that manages the pension fund, whose name was changed to Promark Global Advisors this year, says the New York Times.

Charles E. F. Millard, head of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, is under investigation for inappropriate contacts with Wall Street firms seeking to obtain lucrative contracts.

Big as California’s budget woes are today, so are the problems lurking in its biggest pension fund. The fund, known as Calpers, lost nearly $60 billion in the financial markets last year. Though it has more than enough money to make its payments to retirees for many years, it has a serious long-term shortfall. Meanwhile, local governments in the state are pleading poverty and saying they cannot make the contributions that would be needed to shore it up.

Years of state and federal neglect have hobbled the nation’s unemployment system just as a brutal recession has doubled the number of jobless Americans seeking aid, the New York Times reported.

General Motors is using its huge pension fund in a way it never intended. It had planned — and put money aside — for a steady march of retirees over time. But instead, tens of thousands of blue-collar workers, most in their 40s and 50s, are all becoming eligible for retirement benefits now, as the company rapidly downsizes.

Washington blessed them as a way to put your 401(k) on automatic pilot and glide safely toward retirement. But popular target-date mutual funds have badly missed the mark - and now regulators are asking why.

A group of well-to-do German senior citizens, who lost their savings in the credit crunch, staged a revenge attack and held their terrified financial advisor to ransom, according to several published reports Wednesday.

Chrysler and Italy's Fiat urged the US Supreme Court late Tuesday to move quickly on Chrysler's proposed sale to Fiat, saying their government-brokered deal could still unravel if it doesn't close by a June 15 deadline.