It was past 10 p.m. last Wednesday and Talbot Stark was ready for bed, when yet another potential client for BNP Paribas SA’s prime brokerage called him at home. In a 20-minute span the next morning, he received three e-mails from customers looking to sign up.

France’s biggest bank is taking as little as 24 hours to sign agreements that required as much as three months to negotiate before the meltdown on Wall Street, said Stark, BNP Paribas’s global head of hedge fund relationships.

By the time the Reserve Fund reported last Tuesday afternoon that its Primary Fund money market funds had “broken the buck” — that is, were no longer worth a dollar a share — investors had already withdrawn billions of dollars from the fund.

Some market analysts assumed they had reacted to the panic sweeping the market. But a lawsuit filed in Minneapolis late last week by Ameriprise Financial offers another explanation: The suit claims the Reserve Fund tipped some big customers about its crisis in advance so that they could get their cash out before its losses became public.

Kavi Kalapi, K. M. Munshi, Narmadashankar Dave, Pannalal Patel, Ranjitram Mehta, Umashankar Joshi, Harilal Upadhyay, Jay Vasavada.

Melchi is just 15 years old and you will never be able to tell that behind his carefree smile and naughty eyes are two years of despair and loneliness.

He is an undiagnosed dyslexic who is struggling to make sense of alphabets and words that would evade him.