Unstructured Finance

Prominent short-seller Jim Chanos is probably one of the last true “bad news bears” you will find on Wall Street these days, save for Jim Grant and Nouriel Roubini. Almost everywhere you turn, money managers still are bullish on U.S. equities going into 2014 even after the Standard & Poor’s 500’s 27 percent returns year-to-date and the Nasdaq is back to levels not seen since the height of the dot-com bubble in 1999.

“We’re back to a glass half-full environment as opposed to a glass half-empty environment,” Chanos told Reuters during a wide ranging hour-long discussion two weeks ago. “If you’re the typical investor, it’s probably time to be a little bit more cautious.”

Chanos, president and founder of Kynikos Associates, admittedly knows it has been a humbling year for his cohort, with some short only funds even closing up shop.

But he told Reuters that the market is primed for short-sellers like him and as a result has gone out to raise capital for his mission: “Markets mean-revert and performance mean-reverts and even alpha mean-reverts if at least my last 30 years are any indication. And the time to be doing this is when you feel like the village idiot and not an evil genius, to paraphrase my critics.”

Chanos’ bearish views are so well respected that the New York Federal Reserve has even included him as one of the money managers on its investment advisory counsel. By his own admission, Chanos said he tends to be the one most skeptical on the markets.

“I still don’t even know what it is” – Jim Chanos, famed short-seller and founder of $6 billion Kynikos Associates.

“You know,  I don’t understand bitcoin” – Bonnie Baha, head of Global Developed Credit at $53 billion DoubleLine Capital.

“I don’t really know enough to have a view” – Chris Delong, chief investment officer of $8.1 billion multi-strategy hedge fund Taconic Capital Advisors

On Thursday, the United States threw cold water on Bruce Berkowitz’s daring proposal to recapitalize mortgage finance behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying the only way to revamp the home loan market is through proper housing finance reform.

Berkowitz’s Fairholme Capital Management said it wants to buy the mortgage-backed securities insurance businesses of Fannie and Freddie by bringing in $52 billion in new capital, in a bid to resolve the uncertain future of the mortgage financiers by freeing them from U.S. government control. For its part, the government said the way forward would be to create a new housing finance system in which private capital would play a pivotal role.

Up until a few days ago, the idea that the government would hand Fannie and Freddie back to private investors seemed unlikely. Now, the idea appears all but dead. This appears to be bad news for a number of well-known money managers – the most prominent of which are Fairholme and Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square – which recently scooped up shares in both companies.

By Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan

Law professor Bob Hockett, widely credited with popularizing the idea of using eminent domain to restructure underwater mortgages, says he continues to be approached by yield-hungry angel investors looking for a way to help out struggling homeowners and make money at the same time.

He said an increasing number of wealthy investors on “both coasts” regularly reach out to him to get more information about how eminent domain would work and get a better read on “the prospects of municipalities adopting one or another variance of the plan.”

Hockett also is continuing to advise local officials in a variety of cities including some in New Jersey and New York (Irvington, N.J. and Yonkers, N.Y. for instance) on how they might use eminent domain to condemn, seize and restructure deeply underwater mortgages for homeowners determined to keep-up with their high monthly mortgage payments.

Icahn’s Big Year in investing and activism

By Jennifer Ablan and Matthew Goldstein

We held an hour-long discussion with Carl Icahn on Monday as part of our Reuters Global Investment Outlook Summit, going over everything from his spectacular year of performance to his thoughts on the excessive media coverage of activists like himself who push and prod corporate managers to return cash to investors. We also talked about the legacy he wants to leave.

There was much Icahn wouldn’t talk about on the advice of his lawyer, however. While he said he took a look at Microsoft, he won’t say why he decided not to join ValueAct’s Jeffrey Ubben’s activist campaign. He also stayed mum on any plans for his Las Vegas white elephant, the unfinished Fontainebleau Las Vegas resort, which he bought out of bankruptcy proceedings in 2010.

Never one to mince words, Icahn said he takes issue with Bill Ackman’s brand of activism which he believes borders on micromanaging by telling chief executive officers how to do their jobs. “I think Ackman is the opposite of what I believe in activism. You don’t go in and you don’t go tell the CEO how to run his company.”

The year can’t end fast enough for some of the world’s biggest investors.

Bill Gross, who many like to consider the King of Bonds, lost one of his prized titles last week when his PIMCO Total Return Fund was stripped of its status as the world’s largest mutual fund because of lagging performance and a swamp of investor redemptions.

The PIMCO Total Return Fund — somewhat of a benchmark for many bond fund managers — had outflows of $4.4 billion in October, marking the fund’s sixth straight month of investor withdrawals, and lowered its assets to $248 billion, according to Morningstar.

Brian Moynihan brought the funny to Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel Thursday evening. The Bank of America chief was on hand to receive the first-ever Happy Warrior award at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, where he shared the dais with political dignitaries like Senator Chuck Schumer and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as well as comedic heavyweight Stephen Colbert. In his remarks, Moynihan cracked a few jokes at the expense of JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Blackstone Group co-founder Steve Schwarzman that brought the house down.

The Al Smith dinner is the culmination of an annual Catholic charity drive that seeks to raise money to aid poor New York City children. This year, the foundation’s organizers announced that the dinner had raised $3 million, one-third of which came from Moynihan and his friends. The award Moynihan took home was meant to celebrate a corporate executive who embodied former New York Governor Al Smith’s character, grace and leadership skills and who had an established record of generosity.

Here a couple of Moynihan’s lines that got the biggest laughs:

On the Happy Warrior Award going to a bank CEO who has had a tough time: 

Earlier this summer, Cardinal Dolan [the archbishop of New York] called me and he said, “We’re going to name an award the Happy Warrior Award and we want to give it to you.” I sort of said, “Why me? Why a bank CEO? We don’t get much awards these days.” His Eminence said they wanted to award a CEO who had been through the ringer over the last few years. He wanted to recognize a CEO whose every decision had been scrutinized. Every decision had been questioned by the press, by the politicians and others. So I thought about it. And then he said, “But Jamie wasn’t available.”

John Hempton is bullish on Herbalife but bearish on coal

By Jennifer Ablan and Matthew Goldstein

Hedge fund manager and frequent blogger John Hempton is a little bit like the Jim Chanos of Australia.

Over the years, he’s been a fairly prescient short seller. For instance he was an early skeptic on computer giant Hewlett Packard and travel services company Universal Travel Group, which recently agreed to pay nearly $1 billion to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit alleging that the company defrauded investors by failing to disclose the transfer of $41 million from stock offerings to unknown parties in China.

But unlike Chanos whose Kynikos Associates almost exclusively goes short—makes a bet a company’s share price will plummet because of fraud, unsustainable revenue growth or simply an unrealistic valuation—Hempton’s Bronte Capital also makes a fair bit of money on the long side as well.

David Einhorn is pointing at you Fed

Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn, one of the most closely followed managers in the $2.2 trillion hedge fund industry, is out with his latest investment letter and provides another lambasting of the U.S. Federal Reserve for what he describes as short-sighted policy decisions with regards to its continued quantitative easing.

“We maintain that excessively easy monetary policy is actually thwarting the recovery,” Einhorn said of the Fed and its decision to continue buying $85 billion a month in Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. “But even if there is some trivial short-term benefit to QE, policy makers should be focusing on the longer-term perils of QE that are likely far more important.”

Einhorn says the Fed’s bond buying prompts some questions about income inequality and the ability of central bankers to deal with the next recession. Specifically, he asks in his letter:

Hedge fund manager Steve Cohen’s reported plan to sell a number of valuable artworks may not only deliver a nice chunk of change for the Wall Street mogul, it may also provide gains for another rival manager.

Cohen is selling several high-profile artworks from his art collection, according to a story Monday in the New York Times, and he has given the task of selling the works to Sotheby’s – the 269-year-old auction house currently in the firing line of activist Daniel Loeb.

Loeb’s hedge fund owns 9.3 percent of Sotheby’s, making his New York-based Third Point the majority shareholder. Loeb wants the company to revamp and overhaul many of its operations and has demanded the resignation of the current CEO William Ruprecht. Sotheby’s has called Loeb’s actions “incendiary and baseless.”