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.
Bloomberg – Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” questioned why Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner kept their posts after failing to foresee the collapse in global credit markets.
Bernanke was appointed to a second term last month by President Barack Obama, while Geithner took his job after being the president of the New York Fed from November 2003 through January of this year. Current National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers was treasury secretary between 1999 and 2001.
“Bernanke, Geithner and Summers didn’t see the crisis coming so why are they still there,” Taleb told a group of business people in Hong Kong. Bernanke is like “a pilot who didn’t see a hurricane,” he added.
Reuters – Australian investment bank Macquarie Group Ltd has managed to quell concerns on its capital position but is now bracing for its next big challenge of the global credit crisis: how to prevent its world-renowned specialist listed-funds model from crumbling.
Macquarie pioneered the specialist listed funds model in the early 1990s, encouraging even some Wall Street investment banks to follow suit. Fees from managing specialist funds made up 13.3 percent of Macquarie’s total income in the year to March 31, 2009.
Reuters – The fund management arm of Swedish banking group SEB is planning to launch a global credit hedge fund in the autumn to take advantage of mis-pricing opportunities in the credit markets.
Peter Branner, global head of investment management at SEB, said the fund would use leverage and take long and short positions in the investment grade and high yield credit markets where the turbulence of the financial crisis has thrown up undervalued and overvalued assets.
SEB will target institutional and private banking clients for the fund, he told Reuters at the Fund Forum industry conference.
Bloomberg – Japan’s attempts to end financial turmoil failed to lure hedge funds back to its swap markets, leaving premiums paid by domestic borrowers near a record, RBS Securities Japan Ltd. said.
Hedge funds, which lost more than $400 billion through withdrawals and market losses since June, pulled out of Japan’s swap markets after the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. led to a seizure in global credit, said Tatsuo Ichikawa, a senior strategist at RBS in Tokyo. Japan’s banks were charged record premiums this month to swap London borrowing rates for those set in Tokyo as a slumping economy exacerbated concern about the health of the nation’s companies.
Morningstar.ca – Hedge fund managers, once the swashbuckling frontiersmen of international finance and subject of fawning cocktail party banter, have quickly gone from hero to goat. As the global credit bubble burst with a vengeance in 2008, so too did the oft-touted myth that these alternative strategies could deliver positive results in any market.
But those claims painted the universe with too broad a brush. There has always been a difference between arbitrage funds that isolated structural inefficiencies, and speculators that either didn’t hedge or used the ability to short stock as a means of leveraging directional bets. Clearly it should never have been expected that a fund that was short financials and long commodities, as many hedge funds were last year, would have a market neutral, "absolute return" profile. The majority of Canadian offerings fall into that camp, so it’s no surprise we’ve seen stark declines among many of our homegrown funds.
Bloomberg – 21st Century Asset Management Co., run by former Nomura Asset Management Co. executive Takanori Shimizu, said it may seek growth through takeovers after the worst year on record for hedge funds.
Shimizu, 63, said he will also cut costs as the Tokyo-based firm strives to boost assets under management to 40 billion yen ($440 million) by the end of March 2010, from 14 billion yen as at Dec. 31, 2008.
“We are carefully considering possible cost cuts just like any other firm,” Shimizu said in an interview yesterday. “Acquiring another asset management firm to boost our assets may be a good strategy and we’re always on the lookout.”
The global credit crisis forced as many as 920 hedge funds out of business last year while the tally of job losses at financial firms worldwide reached 269,000. Last week, Rheos Capital Works Inc., a Tokyo-based hedge fund, said it would sell a majority stake to IS Holdings Inc. to weather the slowdown.
Bloomberg – Credit-default swap dealers reduced the volume of outstanding contracts for the first time amid efforts to reduce risks in a market used to hedge against bond losses and speculate on corporate creditworthiness.
The volume of outstanding trades fell to $54.6 trillion from $62 trillion in the first half, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association said in a statement yesterday. It was the first decline since ISDA started surveying traders in 2001.
“This decrease primarily reflects the industry’s efforts to reduce risk by tearing up economically offsetting transactions and demonstrates the industry’s ongoing commitment to reduce risk and enhance operational efficiency,” ISDA Chief Executive Officer Robert Pickel said in the statement. “We expect to see more effects of this over time.”
Boston Globe – Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are responding to the credit crisis with a system that uses the market’s view of their own creditworthiness as a basis for lending decisions, the Financial Times reported.
Wall Street’s second-largest investment bank Morgan Stanley is essentially tying its promise to provide financing to hedge fund clients to the price of credit insurance on its own debt, it said.
If the cost of the protection rises to a certain level, that would trigger a reduction in Morgan Stanley’s commitments to hedge funds, the quoted people familiar with the situation as saying.
The message is that "if our firm is in trouble, we would rather fund ourselves than fund you (hedge funds)," the paper quoted a brokerage executive with knowledge of the arrangements as saying.
