Two former law firm partners who helped prosecutors unravel a lucrative lawsuit kickback scheme that raked in nearly $240 million for their firm were each sentenced to six months in federal prison on Monday.

Steven Schulman, 57, and David Bershad, 68, were key players in the scheme targeting now-defunct energy giant Enron Corp., AT&T Inc., Lucent, WorldCom, Microsoft Corp., Prudential Insurance and other companies.

Before their sentencing, both men apologized for deceiving the public and the judicial system while working at New York-based Milberg Weiss, now known as Milberg LLP. The firm has said former partners paid about $11.3 million in kickbacks to plaintiffs in cases that brought it roughly $239 million in legal fees.

PLUS has produced a video for presentation at the opening session of the PLUS International Conference which profiles attorney Bill Lerach and his role in the Milberg Weiss kickback scheme. You can see a clip of that video here.

Could the volume—and tone—of TV, Web, and print coverage of the market's gyrations actually be making things worse?

Wall Street has been through crises before—1907, 1929, the 1970s, and 1987 all tested investors as much as the financial crisis of 2008. But this time, something is different: Three cable business channels and countless web sites offer 24-hour coverage of financial markets seven days a week.

The sheer quantity of information available raises the question: Could the media actually be contributing to the very crisis it is covering?

During past crises, average investors needed to wait until the evening news or the next day's newspaper to learn how their investments had done.

The 2008 PLUS International Conference Opening Session will feature "The Rise and Fall of Bill Lerach" - a special documentary created specifically for the International Conference.  Featuring interviews with Debra WongYang, the U.S. Attorney who oversaw the case, Robert McGahan, the Lead Prosecutor that brought Lerach down, John J. Degnan, one of the most well-known and senior representatives in our industry, Michael Oxley, former US Representative from Ohio, and one of the final interviews with Bill Lerach five days prior to his incarceration.  The video will be followed by "The Future of the Plaintiff's Bar", a live panel discussion focusing on the changing dynamics and practices associated with pursuing securities class action litigation.

Click this link for more information about the PLUS Conference.

Giants of the auto, airline and technology industries ordered emergency action against the global financial crisis on Friday as shares took a new hammering amid mounting gloom. Even a 1.5 million barrel a day production cut by OPEC failed to stop oil prices falling amid fears of a deep global recession.

Grim news backing those fears came from around the world. China, Japan and 11 other Asian nations agreed to set up an 80-billion-dollar war chest to fight what ex-US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan called a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami".

French auto giants PSA Peugeot-Citroen and Renault ordered huge production cuts, while Japan's hi-tech giant Sony Corp. and Europe's biggest airline Air France-KLM issued profits warnings. In Britain, official figures confirmed the country was about to enter a recession while Turkey's central bank took action to strengthen bank liquidity and prop up the slumping currency.

The Garden City Group administered class-action settlements reached after investors sued the telecommunications companies WorldCom and Global Crossing, businesses that helped symbolize corporate excesses in the late 1990s.

The Group, which is hired by attorneys, began work on those cases in 2003 and is just now winding down the disbursements, said president and chief operating officer Neil Zola.

The $6-billion WorldCom settlement is the second-largest in U.S. history and involved nearly a million claims, he said. The largest is Enron's $7-billion-plus settlement.

The WorldCom settlement came after the former Mississippi-based company's chief executive, Bernard Ebbers, was convicted in 2005 of an $11-billion accounting fraud scheme. Also in 2005, Global Crossing, once headquartered in Beverly Hills, Calif., and some top executives settled government allegations that the company artificially boosted its revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars. The Global Crossing settlement involved 500,000 claims and totaled $450 million.

Read the full story here on the Chicago Tribune website.

Nelson Villanova doesn't need to watch the stock market indexes, the TED spread, or gross domestic product to gauge the health of the economy. He just has to look down. If he sees scuffed shoes, then he knows things are bad.

Villanova, general manager of Eddie's Shoe Repair in New York's Grand Central Terminal, has seen business drop 25% to 30% since August. The 15-year-old company employs 40 people across five locations in the sprawling train station, shining and repairing shoes and luggage. But lately, selling $4 shines seems to be as hard as unloading mortgage-backed securities.

The condition of commuters' shoes is just one signal of the financial crisis rippling through the business world. Other indicators emerged even before the market meltdown began in September: This summer FedEx shipped 10% or fewer overnight envelopes than last summer. Business jet takeoffs and landings were down 18% in August. And office-supply sales have dropped every month since December 2007.

Federal prosecutors and New York's attorney general said Monday they had taken the unusual step of joining forces to probe the multitrillion-dollar credit-default swap market, an unregulated area of finance blamed for helping to fuel the credit crisis.

The offices of U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo acknowledged the unique arrangement in separate statements.

"The attorney general believes that these unprecedented times call for unprecedented levels of effort and cooperation to ensure that our markets are stable, free of fraud and purged of corruption," Cuomo spokesman Alex Detrick said.

He said the joint probe was "aimed at restoring and promoting confidence and stability in the market" and avoiding multiple competing investigations.

Yusill Scribner, a Garcia spokeswoman, said prosecutors wanted to determine if federal laws were violated.

Interviews with Wharton finance professors Jeremy Siegel and Richard Marston on whether the bank plan being pursued by the U.S. Government will revive the global markets and bring some calm to the credit and stock markets.

Click here to read the interview from the Knowledge at Wharton website.

Fitch Ratings said today that balance sheet pressures for insurance and reinsurance companies globally are becoming more severe as insurers experience greater unrealized market value losses, and take impairments, on their investment portfolios. As such, Fitch expects a noteworthy ramp up in such losses to be reported by many insurers in the third quarter.

A judge has thrown out a Nebraska legislator's lawsuit against God, saying the Almighty wasn't properly served, because of his unlisted home address. State Sen. Ernie Chambers filed the lawsuit last year seeking a permanent injunction against God.

He said God has made terroristic threats against the senator and his constituents in Omaha, inspired fear and caused "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants."

Chambers has said he filed the lawsuit to make the point that everyone should have access to the courts regardless of whether they are rich or poor.

The credit market crisis will shift the balance of power within the finance industry towards insurers and away from banks, the Chief Executive of the world's biggest reinsurer Munich Re said.

German insurers are also unlikely to make use of the 500 billion-euro ($683 billion) rescue package for the financial sector expected to be adopted by parliament this week, Nikolaus von Bomhard told the Hamburg business journalists' club late on Tuesday.

"We ourselves will have nothing to do with it, from today's point of view," von Bomhard said.

Fellow reinsurer Hannover Re has also said it does not plan to make use of the package, while Europe's biggest insurer Allianz says it is well capitalised and has "no direct need" to use the fund.

First the house of Lehman fell. Now the insurance bill is coming due.

Nearly three weeks after the Wall Street bank sank into bankruptcy, financial companies and investment funds that wrote what are effectively insurance policies on Lehman Brothers’ debts are being called on to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in claims.

Whether those claims can or will be paid, and the financial repercussions that could follow if they are not, will signify the biggest test yet for the vast, unregulated market in credit-default swaps.

The danger is that the claims on the Lehman default are so large — they are estimated at $400 billion to $600 billion — that settling them could leave some companies with large, perhaps even crippling, losses and heighten the turmoil in the financial markets.

This headline is from a Commentary in the Insurance Journal written by Christopher J. Boggs. The article points out the importance of approaching insurance as a profession, and goes so far to scrutinize the elements of a profession (specialized knowledge, legal and educational barriers to entry, and protection / betterment of society) and how  the insurance profession meets these criteria.

PLUS has always considered professional liability to be a profession – there is both an art and a science to underwriting professional liability risks. And, to help educate our members, we have continued to develop and promote quality education in the professional liability subset of insurance. Just look to our development of the new 23 Part Curriculum, the RPLU Designation, our variety of Chapter, Regional and International Events, and our PLUS Journal. Each educational opportunity developed with our industry in mind – leading to educated professionals who are better at the job they are doing.

You can read the full article from Mr. Boggs here on the Insurance Journal website. And then check out the links to educational opportunities I noted above. Although much of the insurance education industry might be passionless and lacking in desire, you’ll see that PLUS is continuing to provide timely, useful and provocative education that develops both the individual and the professional.

We're proud of the commitment our members have made to education - and we're proud to partner with them and provide them the tools and information to fulfill that commitment.

The Federal Reserve Board said Wednesday that it would provide up to $37.8 billion to the embattled insurer the American International Group to help it deal with a rapidly dwindling supply of cash.

The additional assistance is on top of $85 billion in a bridge loan that the Federal Reserve extended to A.I.G. in September, but it will take a different form. A spokesman for A.I.G., Nicholas Ashooh, said the new assistance was intended to keep the company from having to draw down the Fed loan so quickly.

The Fed threw A.I.G. the $85 billion lifeline shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when the financial markets were reeling and there were doubts the system could weather the demise of another big financial services company. At the time, the Fed’s loan was the most radical intervention ever by the central bank in a company’s affairs.

Executives at American International Group Inc. hid the full range of its risky financial products from auditors as losses mounted, according to documents released Tuesday by a congressional panel examining the chain of events that forced the government to bail out the conglomerate.

The panel sharply criticized AIG's former top executives, who cast blame on each other for the company's financial woes.

``You have cost my constituents and the taxpayers of this country $85 billion and run into the ground one of the most respected insurance companies in the history of our country,'' said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. ``You were just gambling billions, possibly trillions of dollars.''

AIG, crippled by huge losses linked to mortgage defaults, was forced last month to accept an $85 billion government loan that gives the U.S. an 80 percent stake in the company.

Read the full story here on the Netscape News website.

Europe's major stock markets hovered around the break-even point Tuesday even as lingering concerns over the credit crisis continued to haunt world markets and financial institutions.

Nearly three hours into the trading day, London's FTSE 100 was down 0.2%, the CAC 40 in Paris gained half a point, and the XETRA DAX in Frankfurt was off 0.6%.

Russia's two main stock exchanges -- the RTS and MICEX -- reopened several hours late on Tuesday, a day after suffering steep plunges. The RTS index fell about 20% Monday. The RTS exchange resumed normal trading at 1 p.m. (5 a.m. ET) and was up 2.6% to 889.1 points as of 2 p.m (6 a.m. ET). The MICEX, where most trading takes place, rose by 3% to 774.5 points. It opened at 1:15 p.m. (5:15 a.m. ET)

Read the full story here on the CNNMoney website.

The last day to enjoy the early registration fees for the PLUS International Conference is Monday, October 6! If you are planning to attend, register prior to the end of the day Monday for the lower registration fee. The PLUS Hotel Block is also filling up, so submit your lodging form when you register to take advantage of the discounted hotel rate!

Registration and lodging information can be found by clicking here.

Over 1400 people have already registered to attend this premier event. To see a list of attendees, please follow the link above, click on the "Material" link and then open the file named "Conf. Registrants as of Oct. 2".

There are many new features this year that we would like to share with you to make your Conference experience more productive and enjoyable.

* Avoid the lines with early Conference registration and check-in on Tuesday, November 4th from 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. in Plaza A of the San Francisco Hilton.

* PLUS will offer continuing education credits for Wednesday's opening General Session.  Beginning at 3:00 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom, join us for "The Rise and Fall of Bill Lerach", a video created for the PLUS Conference, followed by a live panel discussion on "The Future of the Plaintiffs' Bar." 

* PLUS is pleased to be offering extended hours and availability to the Registrant’s Networking Lounge.  It will be open at all times the Conference is in session, with the exception of the opening night reception.  You MUST be a registered Conference attendee or have a sponsor pass to make use of the Registrant's Networking Lounge.

* PLUS has obtained a 15% discount off spa services for Conference Attendees at Spa Fusion located in the San Francisco Hilton.  Just advise the spa attendant that you are with the PLUS Conference to receive the discount.

* Finally, U.S. attendees should note that the Conference falls very close to Election Day.  If you will be traveling or otherwise engaged on November 4, be sure to cast your vote via absentee ballot.  Information for your particular state can be here at the Long Distance Voter website.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco next month!

House members are getting another chance to vote on a bill many would like to avoid: a massive financial rescue that has infuriated millions but is being promoted as critically needed to stave off a deep recession.

This time, it comes back to the House loaded with billions of dollars worth of tax cuts and other sweeteners. They are meant to attract at least a dozen House members who voted against the measure Monday, when it failed, 228-205, triggering a record drop in the stock market.

Senators added the new items in a 74-25 vote late Wednesday, sending the rewritten package back to the House for a showdown vote expected Friday. House leaders planned to spend Thursday pressing rank-and-file members for the dozen converts they need.

In the first anti-climax of the legislative drama that started 13 days ago with a market slide and rumblings of a rescue proposal from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the Senate passed a much-embellished version of his $700 billion proposal by a wide margin, 74-25.

Senators Barack Obama and John McCain returned to Washington from the campaign trail to vote for the bill, while Joe Biden interrupted preparation for Thursday’s vice presidential debate. Both Obama and McCain had called on Congress to act quickly, echoing President Bush, who warned of grave danger to the economy if the bill wasn’t passed soon. Bush has said he will sign it. Both candidates left soon after the vote, skipping a press conference afterward at which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid praised the chamber. “We worked together for the good of the country,” he said. “We will not let the economy fail.”

A year ago, few people had heard of the term credit crunch, but the phrase has now entered dictionaries.

Defined as "a severe shortage of money or credit", the start of the phenomenon has been pinpointed as 9 August 2007 when bad news from French bank BNP Paribas triggered sharp rise in the cost of credit, and made the financial world realise how serious the situation was.

Click here to see an outstanding recap of the credit crunch from a global perspective. This is from the BBC News Website.