HedgeCo.net (West Palm Beach) – Viathon Capital, LP has officially launched the Whitewater Master Fund, LP, a credit opportunity fund focused on non-correlated absolute returns.

Employing a fundamental, credit-intensive research process in order to identify long and short investment opportunities in the United States and Europe, the hedge fund’s objective is to seek long term capital appreciation by investing in high yield and investment grade corporate bonds and bank debt.

As part of this launch, Viathon Capital has affiliates of Citigroup Alternative Investments, LLC (CAI) as its seed investor in this new fund. The fund launched in May of 2009 with $50 million in capital and had a net return of +0.92 % for the month of May and estimates +2.10% for June bringing it’s inception to date return to approximately +3.02%.

Viathon Capital’s team includes four investment professionals and two trade support/back office personnel with backgrounds from Marathon Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Neuberger Berman, SAC/Sigma, Providence Investment Management and Lehman Brothers.

Alex Akesson

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Straits Times – Hedge fund executives at the conference said Mr Obama’s deal undercut bankruptcy court rules that have long given priority to secured lenders. The White House move and its combative stance with hedge funds may keep some managers on the sidelines or chill investment in some companies.

Mr Gary Kaminsky, former managing director at Neuberger Berman, told conference members that government involvement began last March with the forced sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase and has not let up since.

‘You have to assume the government will be involved. You have to assume the free market is not as free as it was in the past and won’t be for the next 20 years,’ Mr Kaminsky said.

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Tags: bankruptcy-court, bear-stearns, chill, conference members, government involvement, hedge fund, hedge funds, jpmorgan chase, kaminsky, lenders, managing director, neuberger-berman, obama, priority, sidelines, straits times, white house

Times Online – Hedge fund managers are paranoid. And they are right to be. The other day I had lunch with a senior financial official whose view of hedge funds was simple. “They were a con. The returns were all due to leverage. And now that the leverage has gone everyone will see they were a con.”

You may disagree with this analysis. You may be convinced that for some hedge funds at least the returns were down to skill. You may argue that their role in the credit crisis has been at worst neutral. But you cannot deny it is pretty worrying for hedge funds when this is the view of a top regulator.

And my lunch companion is not alone. According to an e-mail from Dick Fuld, the former chairman of Lehman Brothers, quoted by The Wall Street Journal, Hank Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, said he wanted to “kill” the bad hedge funds and “heavily regulate the rest”. The Italian Finance Minister has promised to put the extermination of hedge funds on the international agenda when Italy takes over presidency of the G8 in January.

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Tags: alan-greenspan, civil-lawsuit, combination-of-the-two, distribution-network, eton-park, journalism, lehman-brothers-holdings, life-insurers, neuberger-berman, squeeze