The news just goes from bad to worse at Babcock & Brown [ASX:BNB]. The company has already had to write off and sell off assets from funds including B&B Power [ASX:BBP].

It is continuing to suffer for the rapid expansion in its structured investments that it and Macquarie rolled off the investment banking production line over the last few years. It was inevitable that bankers would have little interest in the long term sustainability of a fund as they were more focused on bringing in as many deals as possible in order to collect big pay cheques.

B&B have had to suffer far more pain that Macquarie due to the fact that B&B are a less diversified organization. When structured products started to go smelly, Macquarie were able to refocus their attention elsewhere. For a company that modeled itself as a smaller version of Macquarie they are probably wishing that they copied the diversity of Macquarie as well.

Farewell Phil
We note with sadness that Telstra (lack of) Public Policy & Communications head Phil Burgess is to resign and return to the United States. We’re not sure whether he managed to achieve anything for Telstra [ASX:TLS] while he was here, except for managing to aggravate a lot of people in government and the telecommunications industry.