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IBNS – Hollywood Reporter said that Witness James Janowitz of Pryor Cashman is buttoning up a $250 million structured finance arrangement — including money from hedge funds — that will help pay for the production of a dozen films.
“The market isn’t as strong as it once was, but there is activity, and the structures make sense as long as they don’t unduly favor the studio or producer,” Janowitz says.
In short, a film-finance bubble that pumped billions into Hollywood during the first few years of the new millennium has popped, but the show is going on with new — and a few old — players.
Reuters – Eden Rock Structured Finance has seen its value drop further in 2009, leaving some investors saying they are worried they may get back little of their money in the hedge fund, which is due to be wound up after losses last year.
Lack of foreign exchange hedging pummelled the fund’s asset values by up to 8.5 percent in July, according to preliminary company estimates seen by Reuters.
Caribbean Net News – The UK Serious Fraud Office is investigating sales of credit-default swaps and structured-finance products, including collateralized debt obligations, prior to the credit crisis, following up an earlier investigation into a hedge fund and a related British Virgin Islands-registered company.
The SFO is looking into whether banks sold such products with flawed valuations, said Sam Jaffa, a spokesman for the government agency in London. No specific companies or credit rating agencies have been targeted under the investigation, he said.
“We’re looking generically at what might give us a cause for concern or a possible lead for finding out more,” Jaffa said in an e-mail Monday. “There’s no suggesting that across- the-board valuations were flawed. However, how valuations are arrived at, what is bundled into the funds and how they were sold are areas of interest.”
Bloomberg – The U.K. Serious Fraud Office is investigating sales of structured-finance products such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations prior to the global financial crisis.
The SFO is looking into whether banks that sold the products knew that valuations were flawed, SFO spokesman Sam Jaffa said today. Jaffa said no specific companies have been targeted as part of the investigation.
“It’s one of those red flag areas that we’re looking at,” Jaffa said.
BloombergThe financial wreckage of 2008 has left no part of our country untouched. It exposed the bankruptcy of business models employed by mortgage companies, investment banks, and rating agencies as well as the flaws of innovations such as structured finance and credit default swaps. It also highlighted regulatory gaps and failures at almost every level of oversight.
In 2008 Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. imploded, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed into conservatorship, mainstay Wall Street firms like Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. were forced to merge with other companies, and giant institutions such as American International Group Inc. clung to existence on federal life support.
More painfully, too many Americans face the twin perils of home foreclosure and job loss as frozen credit markets signal an increasingly deep economic slowdown.
