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.
Bloomberg – President Barack Obama handed the U.S. Congress a road map for an overhaul of financial-services regulation in June, including greater oversight of derivatives and system-wide risks, new ways to wind down failed companies and a consumer agency to regulate credit cards and mortgages.
The House Financial Services Committee divided the proposal into seven pieces, and completed most of its work yesterday. The committee put off to next month consideration of measures dealing with firms considered too big to fail and the creation of a national insurance office. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, plans to repackage the pieces into one measure, and send that to the House floor in December.
New York (HedgeCo.net) – The fund which the U.S. House Financial Services Committee is setting up to dismantle large insolvent financial institutions will be limited to $200 billion, MarketWatch reported earlier today.
“The cap we have is $200 billion,” House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said, referring to legislation which would collect funds from large financial institutions and hedge funds with $10 billion in capital or more.
The Chairman’s regulatory-overhaul package, in opposition to the Obama administration, which wants to collect fees after a company fails, is up for vote by the House this month. The fund would be used to make payments to creditors and counterparties of a large failing financial institution so that its collapse does not unsettle the financial markets.
MSN – Two agencies with oversight of the financial markets are trying to coordinate their regulations to eliminate differences involving similar types of investments and instruments.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, the government’s primary markets watchdog, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — which oversees the trading of oil, gas and other commodities as well as financial instruments — have battled in the past over regulatory turf and found separate supporters in Congress.
But as lawmakers craft an overhaul of the nation’s financial rules and consider the Obama administration’s sweeping proposal, the two agencies recently reached an agreement on sharing regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives market. Derivatives are traded in a $600 trillion unregulated market worldwide.
Reuters – Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration’s pay czar, said on Sunday he has broad and "binding" authority over executive compensation, including the ability to "claw back" money already paid, and he is weighing how and whether to use that power.
Feinberg told Reuters that Citigroup Inc included the contract of energy trader Andrew Hall in submissions due Friday by seven major companies still locked in the federal government’s TARP Program.
Feinberg said he hasn’t looked at Hall’s contract, which reports have said could pay him as much as $100 million this year.
Private Equity Hub – A group of hedge funds that provided bankruptcy funding to Delphi Corp on Monday won a high-stakes auction to take control of the auto parts supplier, scuttling a rival deal brokered by the Obama administration.
Delphi’s board of directors and GM both offered their support for the proposed deal that would hand the company’s assets over to its debtor-in-possession lenders in exchange for their forgiveness of nearly $3.5 billion in loans.
The result, announced by Delphi late Monday, came after a two-day auction in New York.
Barron – President Obama took credit Wednesday for the recovery in the financial markets while at the same time decrying Wall Street’s profits and the big bonuses that will be paid out as a result.
In his prime-time news conference, Obama said that if shaming those on Wall Street who take home multi-billion-dollar bonuses doesn’t work, he vowed to make sure shareholders of those companies were made aware of the compensation being doled out.
In the absence of "remorse" of Wall Streeters for raking in big paychecks once again, the president said financial regulatory reform would be necessary to prevent banks from taking risks that he said caused the financial crisis necessitating government bailouts.
Courthouse News Service – President Obama’s plan to overhaul financial regulations, to prevent a repeat of the country’s credit and banking catastrophe, is laid out in a "nearly final" 85-page document the president is expected to reveal today.
Among other things, the president proposes creating a National Bank Supervisor to oversee all federally chartered banks; strengthening capital requirements for banks; requiring hedge funds and other private pools of capital to register with the SEC; and regulating derivatives, including credit default swaps.
The plan would give the Federal Reserve more authority over large financial institutions that could threaten the financial system, and give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. greater power to seize and break up such institutions.
The document proposes five "key objectives;" 1. Promote robust supervision and regulation of financial firms; 2. Establish comprehensive supervision and regulation of financial markets 3. Protect consumers and investors from financial abuse; 4. Improve tools for managing financial crises; and 5. Raise international regulatory standards and improve international cooperation.
The first objective of the plan calls for "new authority for the Federal Reserve to supervise all firms that could pose a threat to financial stability, even those that do not own banks."
FierceFinance – David Einhorn, the head of Greenlight Capital, caused quite a stir at the Ira W. Sohn Investment Research Conference last year. He made it known that he was shorting Lehman Brothers, which was trading at $60 at the time. You know the rest of the story.
It’s no surprise that people, including a columnist for the New York Post, were interested in what he had to say at the conference this year. He didn’t deliver the same sort of shocker. Rather, he offered a sober analysis of the Obama Administration’s performance. He basically thinks that the focus on propping up banks hasn’t really done much to the economy as a whole.
Wall Street Journal – The new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration is among the wealthiest Obama administration appointees, with income of at least $10 million in 2008 thanks mostly to her husband, a hedge-fund executive, according to financial disclosure forms.
Margaret Hamburg and her husband, Peter Fitzhugh Brown, must divest themselves of several hedge-fund holdings as well as some of Mr. Brown’s inherited drug-company stocks so Dr. Hamburg can take the post as the nation’s top food and drug regulator. Mr. Brown is a lieutenant to hedge-fund magnate James Simons.
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.
Pottstown Mercury – I have seen the future of conservatism and … he is a hedge fund manager.
I refer to hedge fund manager Clifford S. Asness, and I’m only halfway kidding. Or maybe I’m not kidding at all. The fact is, Asness has launched the single most lucid and inspiring counter-attack against the Obama administration’s brazen assault on capitalism as seen in its Chrysler bankruptcy shakedown.
Miami Herald – The Obama administration’s bid for $50 million to move prisoners from the Guantánamo Bay detention facility was left out of the Democratic-authored emergency war spending bill unveiled Monday.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates had sought the funds in case the U.S. wanted to build or retrofit an alternative facility for the detainees in the United States. He called the funds ”a hedge” in case the government wanted to start construction.
However, when Democrats in the House of Representatives released their spending package Monday for funding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and related expenses, the $50 million for Guantánamo was missing.
