Bear Shuffles Asset Management

Lane is the former co-head of asset management at Lehman. As chairman and chief executive of Bear Stearns Asset Management, or BSAM, he replaces Richard Marin, the unit's current chairman and CEO, who has been chief executive of BSAM since 2003, the paper reported.

While Marin will remain as a senior advisor to Lane, he would appear to become the first major management victim of Bear's hedge-fund crisis. Two hedge funds run by Bear Stearns are struggling because of their investments in debt backed by subprime mortgages. The firm has pledged about $1.6 billion to bail out one hedge fund that invested primarily in subprime mortgages and has told investors that a second, riskier fund has lost much of its value, the paper reported.

The near-collapse of the two Bear Stearns hedge funds is partially the focus of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. The SEC has opened around a dozen investigations involving complex bundled financial products as well as the problems of the two Bear Stearns funds, the paper reported.-New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants