While other funds struggle through the mortgage crisis, a hedge fund founded by former Harvard Management Co. CEO Jack R. Meyer is flourishing.

Meyer and former Harvard colleagues run Convexity Capital Management, which makes trading bets that benefit from volatility. The fund, started last year, had disappointing early results. But recent market swings have brought a turnaround.

Accredited Home Lenders Holding Co., a major subprime lender, said Wednesday it would close 65 branches around the country and fire 1,600 workers as the mortgage meltdown continues to spread.

For at least two of the company’s directors, it must have seemed like deja vu all over again.

Richard Pratt and Bowers Espy were S&L regulators in the early 1980s as that industry was in crisis.

John Edwards, the candidate who has stacked his campaign on fighting poverty, was embarrassed once again last week by John Edwards the multimillionaire.

Edwards, who declared his candidacy from the decimated Ninth Ward of New Orleans, and who has repeatedly criticized foreclosures on mortgages held by victims of Katrina, is a major investor in Fortress Investment Group, one of the companies foreclosing.

The subprime mortgage mess claimed its first big Wall Street name Sunday as Bear Stearns forced out co-president Warren Spector.

Bear Stearns, which had two of its hedge funds collapse in June erasing more than $1.5 billion in capital, is a big player in bonds that back high-risk mortgages.

Spector, seen by some as the eventual successor to Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne, resigned. At a board meeting Sunday, directors determined that Alan Schwartz would be the sole president of the company.

Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, has taken some heat for his split with his party over a plan to raise taxes in the hedge fund and private equity industries.

Some scratch their heads and wonder if the frequent crusader for the middle class is being overly influenced by political contributions from the buyout kings, who would see their personal taxes more than double under the plan.

But there really is no mystery. Schumer, a career politician and life-long New Yorker, is being true to his city, where many of the buyout firms are based.

Angelo Mozilo, who made news this week with his startlingly candid assessment of the nation’s housing market, is a self-made man.

To pay tuition when he attended Catholic high school, he got a job with a mortgage company during the week and continued to work in his father’s Bronx butcher shop on the weekends, according to his biography with The Horatio Alger Association.