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New York (HedgeCo.Net) – While authorities are trying to locate and freeze all of the assets of admitted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, lawyers representing his wife, Ruth, claim that she has millions in assets, all independent of her husband’s scam.
In an order filed yesterday, it was disclosed that Ruth Madoff owns $45 million in municipal bonds, and a New York City apartment. Ruth also apparently isn’t facing any liquidity crunch; she has $17 million in cash sitting in a Wachovia bank account.
U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton wrote that “some of the assets covered by the relief order are unrelated to the alleged Madoff fraud and only Ruth Madoff has a beneficial ownership in these assets.”
Earlier last month, Bernard Madoff agreed to a permanent freeze on his assets, without admitting or denying fraud charges.
Mr. Madoff has contested that he worked alone, however doubts surfaced when Mrs. Madoff withdrew $15.5 million from a brokerage account in her name in the weeks leading up to her husband’s arrest. The account was with Cohmad Securities Corp., an entity part owned by her husband.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
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Tacoma News Tribune – It was a year of disillusionment, betrayal and excruciating pain for investors.
Wall Street got investing so wrong that the financial system needed an emergency $700 billion transfusion of taxpayer money to avoid collapse, and investors lost trillions of dollars of their life’s savings.
For the regular person with a 401(k), it didn’t help much if they obeyed the lessons of sound investing. Although investors are told that diverse mutual fund choices will help them get through a stock market downturn, the practice didn’t save them from a miserable 2008.
As the stock market plunged more than 50 percent from its October 2007 high, everything but U.S. Treasury bonds suffered drastic losses – real estate, commodities, U.S. stocks, international stocks and even hedge funds, municipal bonds and corporate bonds. As investors panicked and headed for the exits, strong and weak investments were sold. Virtually nothing was immune.
“All 10 sectors within the Standard & Poor’s 500 fell, from a 22 percent slump for consumer staples to a 74 percent thrashing for the financials,” said Standard & Poor’s chief investment strategist Sam Stovall.
Globe and Mail – Joe E. Lewis, the late American nightclub comic and inveterate horse player, once quipped: "I hope I break even. I need the money." That could very well become a mantra in the hedge fund world, where even the best and brightest of managers with impressive track records have been suffering through some of their worst results in years.
In the first three months of this year alone, 170 funds in the United States went out of business, and that was before things got really bad. Globally, hedge funds ended the first half with their most dismal performance in a decade. And then came the selloff in resource stocks, which brought misery to commodity funds, one of the few bright spots earlier in the year. July ended up being the worst month for futures in more than five years.
Scotia Capital’s Canadian hedge fund index, a useful measure of performance, was off 8.6 per cent on an asset-weighted basis last month, bested by both the gloom-laden TSX composite and S&P 500 indexes.
