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Guardian Unlimited – Japanese government bond futures fell on Monday, edging back towards six-month lows hit earlier this month, with traders citing selling by hedge funds on the back of concerns about rising debt issuance.
The Ministry of Finance said it would issue an additional 16.9 trillion yen ($175 billion) in JGBs in the fiscal year that ends next March to pay for an economic stimulus package.
The extra supply, which will start coming to the market in July, will increase calendar base JGB issuance in fiscal 2009/10 by roughly 15 percent to a total of 130.2 trillion yen.
Bloomberg – BlackRock Inc.’s global macro fund, the world’s second-best performer over two years among hedge funds that invest based on economic trends, is betting against this month’s equities rally and buying bonds as a recovery from the worst credit crisis since the Great Depression falters.
BlackRock’s A$216 million ($152 million) Asset Allocation Alpha Fund returned 41 percent in 2008, when hedge funds around the world lost a record 19 percent on average. The fund is short U.S. and Australian equities, expecting them to decline, and long U.S., German, Australian, Canadian, and U.K. bonds, said its manager David Hudson.
“The risk is that the economic recovery disappoints in the second half and that equity markets need to revisit their lows in the next few months and maybe go through them,” Sydney-based Hudson said in an interview March 20.
The MSCI World Index, which tumbled 42 percent last year, has rallied 21 percent since March 9, boosted in part by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to pump money into the economy to get credit flowing. Hudson profited from the declines last year by betting against equities.
BlackRock, which oversees $1.3 trillion, is the biggest publicly traded asset manager in the U.S. Over a third of total assets are managed on behalf of non-U.S. investors, and nearly one-third of its employees are outside the U.S.
Wall Street Journal – Experts say hedge funds are not responsible for the wholesale selloff in U.K. financial stocks which saw shares in the four remaining major banks dive to record lows earlier this week and prompted renewed calls to the U.K. financial regulator to reintroduce a ban on the short-selling of financial stocks.
While Lloyds Banking Group (LYG), HSBC Holdings PLC and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC (RBS) all closed in positive territory Wednesday with Barclays PLC (BCS) only down 0.07%, all four had had massive falls Monday and Tuesday.
Miami Herald – Nearly two-thirds said they had lost 70 percent of their investments or more, according to the survey by the Shanghai Securities News, a newspaper affiliated with the stock exchange.
Many Asian hedge funds, meanwhile, took a drubbing and closed shop by the dozens, with their traditionally long bets on the markets’ moves souring amid the furious sell-off.
Whether 2008′s lows, reached mostly in October and November, hold in 2009 is a matter of debate.
