Each business day HedgeCo.Net keeps you informed with the top hedge fund industry news, opinion and insight from around the globe. From the latest hedge fund launches, to the impact of regulation, competition, and investor activism - we track the topics and people that make a difference to you.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – The private equity firm Carlyle Group will liquidate its lone hedge fund, after stating that it failed to achieve “critical mass.”
The fund, Carlyle-Blue Wave Partners Management LP, was a multi-strat fund launched by Rick Goldsmith and Ralph Reynolds. The two managers previously served as co-heads of global equity derivatives at Deutsche Bank.
"This is an orderly liquidation to ensure fair and equitable treatment of all investors," said Carlyle spokesman Chris Ullman.
The fund was among many to suffer losses fueled by the credit crisis that starting brewing last summer. After posting losses in 2007, the fund looked to be turning around and even showed gains of 2 percent in 2008. However, Carlyle said they could not keep up with the cost associated with staff and infrastructure and decided to go forth with the liquidation.
According to a statement published on the company’s website, the fund was "launched in a challenging market and [has not] been able to achieve the critical mass of assets under management necessary to support a multi-strategy fund infrastructure."
Assets under management are now estimated at $600 million, $300 million less than its peak.
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New York (HedgeCo.Net) – Alan Schwartz, former Bear Stearns CEO, has decided to leave JPMorgan and pursue other ventures.
“With most of the work on the merger integration behind us, Alan will be moving on from the firm at the end of August to pursue other interests,” said JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon in a memo distributed internally.
Schwartz, 58, is expected to finish out the month of August at JPMorgan. The New York Post reported last month that Schwartz was presented several offers including one from private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and others from hedge funds.
“Despite the extremely difficult circumstances that brought our firms together, Alan has been a terrific and constructive partner through the process,” Dimon added in the memo.
Schwartz took the leading role at Bear Stearns, replacing James Cayne. He was in office only three months before the shocking Federal Reserve-backed buyout that put 14,000 of his employees out of a job. Some suspected he was reluctant to align himself with JPMorgan after such a large number of his staff was laid off. Schwartz defended his company’s implosion, blaming the event on false market rumors of a liquidity crunch.
"I am very proud to have been a part of Bear Stearns,” Schwartz stated in the memo. "It was a special place I know many of us will miss.”
While an insider did confirm Schwartz’s exit plan, there is no word yet on what his severance will entail.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
HedgeCo.Net is a premier hedge fund database and community for qualified and accredited investors only. Membership on www.hedgeco.net is FREE and EASY. We also offer FREE LISTINGS for Hedge Funds! Be sure to check out our sister sites. For more information, visit www.hedgeconetworks.com
Bloomberg- Henry Kravis is taking KKR & Co. public and moving into real estate and stock funds as he tries to catch up with Stephen Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private-equity firm.
KKR, co-founded by Kravis in 1976, relied on leveraged buyouts for 95 percent of profit last year, compared with 29 percent for Blackstone.
That has left the New York-based firm more vulnerable to the collapse of the LBO market, where announced deals fell more than 70 percent to $163.1 billion this year through July 25 from the same period in 2007, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
FINalternatives- It’s not the first time “hedge fund” has been used as an epithet, but a former U.S. Treasury chief is using the H.F. words to describe mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The two firms, into which Treasury said yesterday it will inject billions of dollars in loans and investments, have been “arbitraging their lower borrowing costs that came about because of the implied status as government entities,” John Snow, who now serves as chairman of private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, told Bloomberg News.
“The business model they were using was really the model of a hedge fund,” he added.
Quamnet.com – Private equity firm Carlyle Group said it has agreed to invest 87 mln usd in Shanghai-based chemical company Sinorgchem (Group) Co.
Sinorgchem is the largest Chinese supplier of para-phenylenediames (PPDs), a key chemical additive in the production of rubber products which help avert premature ageing of rubber. The company has an annual capacity of 45,000 tons of PPDs.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – A $7.2 billion bailout package was approved Tuesday by 94% of Washington Mutual Shareholders in a move that gives private equity firm TPG control of over 50% of the company, says the Seattle Times.
Not that there was much of an alternative. The other option would come in the form of a $792 million dividend that WaMu would have to pay the company, with increasing payments ahead. Though that didn’t stop protesters led by the Service Employees International Union to emphasize that this was a “toxic deal.”
The Union also stated that the private equity firm would seek high profits in the short term and “squeeze these returns from troubled banks through higher fees for bank customers, unfair lending practices and exorbitant interest rates on credit cards and other consumer products.”
In April, TPG bought 176 million shares of WaMu at $8.75 each, a 33% discount at the time.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
HedgeCo.Net is a premier hedge fund database and community for qualified and accredited investors only. Membership on www.hedgeco.net is FREE and EASY. We also offer FREE LISTINGS for Hedge Funds! Be sure to check out our sister sites. For more information, visit www.hedgeconetworks.com
Reuters- Private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management is starting a new fund to invest in assets it thinks have been driven down too low by the credit crisis, Chairman John Snow told Reuters on Thursday.
The decision by Cerberus to wade more heavily into the market for distressed assets follows similar moves by a growing number of its rivals, including Apollo and Blackstone.
The Cerberus fund will focus on international assets, with only a small percentage likely to be devoted to the United States, Snow said. The former U.S. Treasury Secretary declined to give a target size for the fund.
Financial Times – China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange has agreed to invest more than $2.5bn in the latest TPG fund, in what could be the largest commitment ever made to a private equity firm, people familiar with the matter say.
The investment by the Chinese entity, known as Safe, underscores the growing inclination of sovereign wealth funds to invest through private equity firms – rather than directly – to minimise the potential political backlash to their growing activity.
It also illustrates the growing importance of sovereign wealth funds to private equity firms at a time when pension funds and non-profit endowments are cutting back their exposure to leveraged buy-out investments.
Investments in private equity firms are usually not made public, but industry executives believe the largest previous investment in a private equity firm came from pension funds in the US states of Oregon and Washington. The two funds both invested about $1bn to $1.5bn in Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.
Safe declined comment.
In recent years, a growing percentage of the money for US private equity firms has come from overseas. In 2002, for example, 25 per cent of the money that Blackstone raised came from outside the US. In 2005, it increased to 40 per cent.
China Investment Corporation, another sovereign wealth fund, has been given authority to invest a small portion of China’s $1,600bn in reserves.
Reuters- Sovereign wealth funds, which control up to $3.7 trillion in assets and have been making headlines as they buy assets in the West, will ultimately have the biggest impact on private equity and hedge funds, analysts at JPMorgan Chase said in a report on Thursday.
State-run investment funds currently own up to 7.5 percent of so-called alternative assets, or about $340 billion, and this stake could grow to as high as 17 percent by the end of 2012, said David Fernandez and Bernhard Eschweiler, analysts at the bank. "The main beneficiaries of the increased allocation by SWFs to alternatives are set to be private equity firms and hedge funds. These managers offer skills, resources and expertise that would be difficult for most SWFs to develop on their own," they said in the report. Indeed, last year one of the highest profile deals among sovereign wealth funds was the China Investment Co Ltd’s purchase of a $3 billion stake in U.S. private equity firm The Blackstone Group.
