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.
Guardian Unlimited – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission needs authority to require hedge fund advisers to register with the agency plus the power to examine funds’ books, the agency’s chairman said on Tuesday.
U.S. lawmakers are working to give the SEC the power to require hedge fund managers to register with the agency after a federal court overturned the SEC’s previous effort to oversee the $1.3 trillion industry.
Speaking at the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit in Washington, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said registration without any further authority "would not be sufficient."
Guardian Unlimited – A U.S. Senate bill to make the $1.3 trillion hedge fund industry more transparent would give federal regulators the authority to require fund managers to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, one of the bill’s authors said on Monday.
Earlier this year, Republican Senator Charles Grassley and Democratic Senator Carl Levin introduced the legislation but wording in the bill sowed confusion among hedge fund advisers.
Guardian Unlimited – Andres Piedrahita, a London-based fundraiser for Bernie Madoff’s fraudulent empire, is among high society figures facing increasing pressure to explain how they missed warning signs around the disgraced hedge fund manager.
Piedrahita, who has homes in Belgravia, New York and Majorca, channelled billions of dollars from Europe into Madoff funds through so-called feeder fund Fairfield Greenwich, where he is a partner. Fairfield has emerged as the largest loser from the Madoff scandal, with potential losses of $7.5bn – more than half its assets under management. The company, founded and controlled by Piedrahita’s father-in-law Walter Noel, is based in New York but investors from Europe are believed to have provided 68% of managed assets.
Guardian Unlimited – Three "distressed debt investors" – hedge fund Polygon, restructuring specialist Oaktree and private equity firm Alchemy – have taken control of Countrywide, Britain’s biggest residential estate agent, which was bought by US private equity firm Apollo less than two years ago for about £1bn, mostly financed by debt. Together, they have taken a majority stake for one-third of the price paid by Apollo.
Distressed debt investors, which specialise in buying financial instruments relating to troubled companies at rock-bottom prices, have been saying for two years that buying debt on the "secondary market" – where company loans are traded after the original lender has sold the debt on – was too expensive. Now, they appear to be judging it the right time to move back in.
Guardian Unlimited – Japan’s public pension fund, the world’s largest, said on Thursday it needs a deeper study of diversifying into alternative investments, such as hedge funds and real estate, after seeing the asset class hit by the financial crisis.
Takahiro Kawase, president of the Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), denied a media report last week that it was planning to start investments in real estate funds from the business year beginning on April 1, 2010.
Washington Observer Reporter – Wall Street’s initial enthusiasm about a $586 billion Chinese stimulus package fizzled Monday, as investors succumbed to anxieties about how U.S. companies will survive a severe pullback in spending.
Stocks got a short-lived boost from China’s plans to boost its economy through a mix of spending, subsidies, looser credit policies and tax cuts. The package could benefit multinational companies with business in China such as General Electric Co. and Caterpillar Inc.
But Wall Street’s optimism quickly waned, as it has tended to do since the mid-September downfall of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and government takeover of the troubled insurance giant American International Group. Market participants realized that while China’s stimulus is a positive sign that governments around the world are working to fix the global economy, the stimulus itself will likely have only a limited effect in the United States.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – After a disappointing year, Citadel will launch several new hedge funds in hopes of countering the losses of their main hedge fund.
The multi-strat $10 billion Kensington Global Strategies Fund has fallen over 30 percent this year. CEO Ken Griffin attributed some of that loss to the temporary ban on short selling, saying it “created material dislocations across many of our portfolios and disrupted our ability to assume and manage risk.”
After much speculation and some bad press, Griffin warned investors last week that returns on the fund would experience “significant volatility” in the next few weeks.
The new funds will focus more on global macro, convertible arbitrage and fixed income strategies, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Griffin told investors, "The financial crisis dramatically raised the cost of borrowing and reduced the availability of credit to market participants, materially reducing the value of cash assets as compared to the value of derivative instruments.” He went onto explain how he did not foresee the financial crisis that has unfolded this past year.
While the Kensington Fund will still be available to investors, many clients are interested in allocating their assets across numerous strategies.
Citadel was founded in 1990 and manages over $20 billion in capital.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Bracewell & Giuliani LLP today announced that it has formed a multi-disciplinary Task Force to guide financial institutions, private investment funds, institutional investors and other market participants through the legislative, regulatory and enforcement challenges posed by the Troubled Asset Relief Act and other impending actions by Congress, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the SEC.
The Task Force will focus in particular on legislation, regulatory actions, enforcement matters and strategic communications to assist market participants in their efforts to navigate one of the most significant governmental actions in the history of the U.S. economy.
Commenting on the formation of the Bracewell Task Force, senior partner Rudy Giuliani said, "Our team of former government officials and experienced attorneys in the fields of legislation, enforcement and finance are equipped to guide institutions in this quickly evolving and complex environment." Mr. Giuliani noted that the Bracewell Task Force includes a former Comptroller of the Currency, a former Assistant Secretary of Legislative Affairs of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, former members of Congress from both political parties, former federal prosecutors, and former SEC enforcement attorneys.
In addition, the Bracewell Task Force will draw heavily upon our resources in the areas of broker-dealer and market regulation, financial restructuring, and corporate and securities.
As part of its services, the Task Force is establishing a blog to relay critical real-time information on the development of policy related to the legislation, regulation and enforcement priorities, and will also be providing periodic updates directly to interested clients.
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West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – While coordinating with overseas regulators to protect Lehman’s customers and maintain orderly markets, the SEC staff who have been on-site at the U.S. broker-dealer will remain in place to oversee the orderly transfer of customer assets to one or more SIPC-insured brokerage firms.
In cases such as this, the SEC says, Lehman Brothers’ customers will benefit from their extensive protections under SEC rules, including segregation of customer securities and cash as well as insurance by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. These safeguards are designed to ensure that a broker-dealer’s customers will be protected.
"For several days, we have worked closely with regulators around the world including the FSA in the United Kingdom, the BaFin in Germany, and the FSA in Japan, as well as our counterparts in other markets around the world, to coordinate our actions in the interest of orderly markets," said SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. "In doing so we have also worked closely with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve and market participants. We are committed to using our regulatory and supervisory authorities to reduce the potential for dislocations from Lehman’s unwinding, and to maintain the smooth functioning of the financial markets."
In the meantime, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. will continue to operate while the bankruptcy process facilitates the reconciliation of claims and the realization of value from its assets in an orderly fashion, according to the SEC.
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New York (HedgeCo.Net) – Less than one week after UBS and Citigroup were called upon to buy back over $30 billion in bad auction-rate securities, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is forcing JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Wachovia to follow suit.
In a letter to the three banks, Chief of the Attorney General’s Investor Protection Bureau David Markowitz wrote, “Our investigation’s focus is shifting to the next group of market participants. Any resolution would need to address the same concerns addressed in the previous settlements.”
UBS was slapped with $150 million in fines and is being forced to buy back some $18.6 billion worth of the auction-rate securities. These securities, backed by municipal bonds and other debts, were sold under the assumption they were a safe investment. Instead, the $330 market collapsed in February, leaving investors and now the government, wondering if the banks were up front about the potentially high risks associated with such investments.
The probe launched by Cuomo will investigate 18 different banks. He is insisting that banks create auction-rate securities buyback programs for the customers who got stuck selling their securities far below par.
Citigroup also got slapped with a $100 million fine and had to deal with both state regulators and the Securities and Exchange Commission. They eventually agreed to buyback $7.3 billion worth of the securities from individual customers and small businesses. In addition, they must help over 2,500 clients sell about $12 billion of the securities.
Morgan Stanley has agreed to buy back $4.5 billion worth of the securities at par. According to the Wall Street Journal, Morgan Stanley will repurchase the securities beginning no later than September 30, from all charities and small to mid-size companies with accounts of $10 million or less that were purchased before February 13th of this year.
Merrill Lynch, in an attempt to quell the probe before it starts, offered last week to buy back about $10 billion in the auction-rate securities. However, Cuomo’s office stated that their plan didn’t contain certain “investor protection safeguards.” The Merrill case is currently under review in Cuomo’s office.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
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Seeking Alpha – In a recent interview, Mr. Stanley Goldstein announced the creation of an industry watchdog group, led by the New York Hedge Fund Roundtable. Its goal is to self-enforce otherwise voluntary and "weak" hedge fund practices. (As I wrote in "Doris Day, Scarlett O’Hara and Financial Market Tumult," July 19, 2008, a July 17, 2008 Financial Times editorial refers to such guidelines as cosmetic, meant to attract institutional investors and to keep regulators at bay.)
Goldstein, a CPA and founder of several hedge funds, explains that the aim is "not to start a separate organization but to use the existing one to compile and disseminate standards for hedge funds to follow," adding that "We do not see enforcement as practical or desirable but rather, hope that ‘industry usage’ will evolve along the lines which we, and others like us, deem appropriate."
Goldstein’s support of the free market to act as the ultimate enforcer is laudable, especially at a time when global regulators are far from silent about the need for more stringent rules. Will Adam Smith’s "invisible hand" really work? Let’s hope so. As this blogger has written many times before, regulations no doubt change the way market participants behave, often leading to the "Law of Unintended Consequences."
