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.
Focus Infomation – France on Friday will press for tighter controls on hedge funds, urging other big industrialised nations to strengthen regulation of the industry and compel banks that lend them money to hold more capital. Paris wants the European Union, and eventually all leading economies, to beef up indirect regulation of hedge funds via their prime brokers, the banks which provide them with loans and other services.
Under plans to be floated by Christine Lagarde, French finance minister, banks could face higher capital requirements to reflect the riskiness of their hedge fund clients, a proposal likely to be resisted by banks that are already struggling to raise capital.
Reuters – Yorkville Advisors, a $1 billion hedge fund, said it is stepping into the lending vacuum left by banks as it provides struggling firms with loans for up to two years, typically in the $5 million to $40 million range.
More recently the value of the loans has increased as larger-cap companies seek assistance. At end-January, Yorkville loaned $147.9 million to shipping firm Ocean Freight Inc.
The move is one way for hedge funds to thrive despite the global financial and economic crisis, and mirrors similar investments by billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
Detroit Free Press – In our view, incessant selling is coming from the liquidation of hedge funds, and it is the new element in the securities markets that no one has experienced before.
This new source of selling has added to the normal amount of selling pressure generated by pessimistic investors, and in a confusing way. Hard information is tough to come by, but a better understanding can be achieved by arranging what we know.
In round numbers, the hedge fund industry peaked at some $1.6 trillion in assets. By the nature of the beast, that asset base is composed of trading strategies using stocks, bonds, options, futures, credit default swaps, you name it.
The funds are also leveraged 1.4 times as an industry average. So, $1.6 trillion becomes $2.25 trillion on a working basis. It is also to be noted that for every position in a trade, someone is on the other side of it. By definition, then, one part of the trade is right, and the other is wrong.
Forbes – Major Wall Street firms placed large bets against Morgan Stanley using credit-default swaps, two days after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc sought bankruptcy protection, the Wall Street Journal said, citing trading records.
The firms included Merrill Lynch & Co, Citigroup Inc, Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG, according to the paper.
The paper said that a close examination of the trading revealed that the swaps played a critical role in magnifying bearish sentiment about Morgan Stanley.
Reuters – Investors who bought protection against a Lehman Brothers default in the credit default swaps market have little to worry about getting paid on Tuesday, when an estimated $8 billion in cash payments on Lehman CDS come due.
While these payments may push a few fragile hedge funds over the edge, analysts say, stringent collateral requirements mean most protection buyers will not be out of pocket.
Comment has circulated in the markets and in the media that CDS counterparties may not be able to come up with the cash.
"The big issue is whether they (CDS) will be settled successfully," wrote ING rate strategist Padraic Garvey on Friday. "The talk is that hedge funds sold protection on Lehman … well now they will have to cough up."
Seeking Alpha – It’s a tough world out there – I saw in the Wall Street Journal the average hedge fund lost 18% in October. Considering what their mandate is i.e. hedge – that is amazing. September was awful as well. We see stories of hedge funds that are performing well (in this market losing 10% in a year is "great") and still facing redemptions because their investors need the cash…. as Ross Perot famously said… there is a "giant sucking sound" in our capital markets.
In a world hard up for cash, even hedge-fund winners can wind up losers. Such is the fate of major credit fund Blue Mountain Capital Management, whose investors have begun yanking investments despite the fund’s performance this year, a modest 2.4% loss, compared with an average 20% loss across all funds. Blue Mountain is a major player in the credit markets, with assets of $5.5 billion invested in bank loans, bonds and credit-default swaps. Its primary fund, the $3.1 billion Credit Alternatives Fund, had lost 2.4% this year through Friday.
Performance was largely beside the point for many Blue Mountain investors, who need access to cash. Theperverse effect is that some investors have begun raiding their better-performing investments, giving the laggards a chance to recover.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said he was all for a merger between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Hopping on board with U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, this was the first time Cox has publically supported a merger that was first brought to the table years ago. The issue was brought up again in March, when Paulson laid out his regulatory reform blueprint which supported the merger of the two agencies.
The SEC and CFTC currently meet every quarter after signing a March memorandum in which they agreed to increase communication and cooperation. While the CFTC oversees the futures market and the SEC serves as an overall police for the markets, many feel the two would perform best under one roof seeing as how their functions tend to overlap.
“This would bring futures within the same general framework that currently governs economically similar securities,” Cox said during a Congressional hearing yesterday.
The House Oversight Committee hearing where Cox gave his public support for the merger was staged in hopes of holding Cox along with former Treasury Secretary John Snow and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan accountable for the lack of regulation that ultimately led to the credit crisis and the demise of several large financial institutions.
Cox, who has been notoriously lax on regulation ever since his appointment by Bush in 2005, reiterated that Congress must also act this year to finalize the regulation of credit default swaps, an act that both agencies have endorsed.
Met with a mix of agreement and disdain, questions remain as to whether the merger can actually take place. Rep. Henry Waxman of California wasn’t about to look to the future without reminding Cox of the mess he helped get us in. "The reality, Mr. Cox, is you weren’t doing that job of proposing these regulations beforehand. You either didn’t anticipate the problem or you agreed with the philosophy that we didn’t need regulation."
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
The Independent – Judy Woodruff: You write in your new book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, that “we are in the midst of a financial crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression.” Was this crisis avoidable?
George Soros: I think it was, but it would have required recognition that the system, as it currently operates, is built on false premises. Unfortunately, we have an idea of market fundamentalism, which is now the dominant ideology, holding that markets are self-correcting; and this is false because it’s generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble.
Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three. Each time, it’s the authorities that bail out the market, or organize companies to do so. So the regulators have precedents they should be aware of. But somehow this idea that markets tend to equilibrium and that deviations are random has gained acceptance and all of these fancy instruments for investment have been built on them. There are now, for example, complex forms of investment such as credit-default swaps that make it possible for investors to bet on the possibility that companies will default on repaying loans. Such bets on credit defaults now make up a $45 trillion market that is entirely unregulated. It amounts to more than five times the total of the US government bond market. The large potential risks of such investments are not being acknowledged.
The Independent – The financial fall-out in the vast, opaque credit default swaps market caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers could be smaller than originally feared, analysts say.
Optimism was rising yesterday that the unwinding of insurance contracts on Lehman debt might involve the transfer of barely $6bn, and that the settlement next week can be completed without a major player failing to pay.
The concern had been that banks and hedge funds who promised to compensate trading partners for losses on Lehman bonds would not have the money to do so, triggering a chain reaction of losses through the financial system.
Although Lehman bonds were valued in a closely-watched auction last Friday at just 8.625 cents on the dollar, and sellers of credit default swaps will have to pay out a higher-than-expected 91.375 cents on the dollar, the great majority of players are both buyers and sellers of credit default swaps – meaning they can net off their exposure.
Bloomberg – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking to jumpstart a hunt for suspected manipulation of financial stocks, will require hedge fund managers, brokerages and institutional investors to describe under oath their bets on the firms.
Investors with “significant” trades in the companies’ securities or credit default swaps must disclose their positions and provide “certain other information” in written statements, the regulator said yesterday. SEC spokesman John Nester declined to say who would receive the requests.
The SEC issued a series of emergency measures, rules and warnings to hedge funds this past week as lawmakers including Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd and executives such as Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer John Mack said traders may be spreading misinformation and using abusive tactics to attack companies. On Sept. 17, the agency said it may also force funds to hand over their communications.
Reuters – On Main Street, insurance protects people from the effects of catastrophes.
But on Wall Street, specialized insurance known as a credit default swaps are turning a bad situation into a catastrophe.
When historians write about the current crisis, much of the blame will go to the slump in the housing and mortgage markets, which triggered the losses, layoffs and liquidations sweeping the financial industry.
But credit default swaps — complex derivatives originally designed to protect banks from deadbeat borrowers — are adding to the turmoil.
"This was supposedly a way to hedge risk," says Ellen Brown, the author of the book "Web of Debt."
Bloomberg – Tokio Marine Holdings Inc. will shift more of its 11 trillion yen ($100 billion) in assets to hedge funds and scour the globe for bargains as the credit squeeze forces down prices.
Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., a unit of Japan’s biggest casualty insurer, may boost its investments in hedge funds by as much as 30 billion yen annually, said Fumihiro Nakajima, who runs the firm’s hedge fund investment group. The insurer has almost 200 billion yen in this asset class, he said.
“Our goal is to gradually increase hedge funds investments,” said Nakajima, 44, in an interview in Tokyo yesterday. “In the wake of subprime loan problems, there will be an opportunity to invest in hedge funds that invest in the credit market,” including high-yield bonds and credit-default swaps.
