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.
The Business Insider – Barack Obama’s decision to paint the hedge funds in the Chrysler case as anti-American obstructionists is prompting death threats against them.
That’s at least what their lead laywer Thomas Lauria is saying, reports The Detroit News. He said in court that the threats have been turned over to the FBI.
We assume Lauria is being honest — you don’t say this stuff in court and turn it over to the FBI if it’s rubbish — though we’ll note that Lauria is being pretty provocative in his attempt to win the war of public opinion in the Chrysler case. He’s of course been airing the complain that one redoubt, Parella Weinberg, only decided to go along with the Rattner plan upon receiving thuggish threats of intimidation.
24/7 Wall St. – Citigroup has gone to the Treasury to beg for bonuses for some of its most important traders, people who make the banks extraordinary amounts of money. The Treasury’s reaction will probably be that it wants to stay out of a fight with Congress and avoid negative public opinion and will turn the request down.
That would be a mistake.
Wall St.’s primary argument for keeping a high level of compensation for its best investment bankers and traders is that, if they leave, overall losses at banks could get worse. People can be profit centers. The most successful ones help offset the red ink created by the series of poor decisions that big financial firms made about mortgage-backed paper and commercial credit loans. It is easy to assess the value of the best traders by looking at a bank’s books.
Times Online – Every week at least one British hedge fund is considering winding up its funds as catastrophic investment performance puts the sector under unprecedented pressure, an industry expert said yesterday.
Andrew Shrimpton, the former head of hedge fund regulation at the Financial Services Authority who now runs Kinetic, a consultancy, said: “The credit crisis is definitely kicking in for the hedge fund industry now. We are being approached by hedge funds considering voluntary fund liquidations on a weekly basis.”
His remarks came as CQS, one of London’s best-known hedge funds, wrote to its investors to say that its flagship $4.25billion CQS Fund had fallen 9.42 per cent for the year to date. Michael Hintze, its chief executive and senior investment officer, told investors that senior management at CQS were meeting as often as three times a day to monitor the fund and take action over its exposures where necessary. The fund, which specialises in convertible arbitrage – or small price differentials between bonds and underlying equities – is down more than 11 per cent for the year.
