http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/oct2007/db20071011_175964.htm
Ralph R. Cioffi seemed as cool and confident as ever. The market for subprime mortgages was crumbling, but the 51-year-old manager of two Bear Stearns (BSC) hedge funds offered nothing but reassurances to investors. "We're going to make money on this," he promised his wealthy patrons in February. "We don't believe what the markets are saying."
He should have known otherwise. The hedge funds were built so they were virtually guaranteed to implode if market conditions turned south, according to a BusinessWeek analysis of confidential financial statements for both funds and interviews with forensic accounting experts, traders, and analysts.
The funds had another potentially fatal flaw: an unusual arrangement with Barclays (BCS) that gave the giant British bank the power to yank the plugâa deal that ran counter to the interests of other investors, many of whom didn't even know about it.
The documents also cast serious doubt on the funds' supposedly strong performance before their July bankruptcies. More than 60% of their net worth was tied up in exotic securities whose reported value was estimated by Cioffi's own teamâsomething the funds' auditor, Deloitte & Touche, warned investors of in its 2006 report, released in May, 2007. What emerges from the records is a portrait of a cash-starved portfolio piled high with debt and managers all too eager to add to the heap.
Spotlight on Hedge Funds
The revelations shed new light on the murky dealings inside the booming $1.3 trillion hedge fund industry, which now accounts for up to a third of all daily trading on Wall Street. They seem to underscore critics' biggest complaint: that many hedge funds use astonishing amounts of leverage, or borrowed money, in sometimes reckless ways. The risks of "fair value" accounting, the practice that allows money managers to estimate the values of securities for which they can't find true market prices, are thrown into sharper focus as well. Coming soon, for better or worse: louder calls in Washington for more oversight of the largely unregulated hedge fund industry.
These new details could further damage the relationships that thousands of pension funds, university endowments, and wealthy individuals have with the Wall Street chieftains they entrust to manage their money. The Bear funds weren't stand-alone portfolios like the ones that blew up on Amaranth Advisors and Sowood Capital Management in recent yearsâthey carried the imprimatur of one of the Street's oldest and most storied firms. The funds marketed themselves with the implicit backing of Bear Stearns and played up the fact that they were run by its experts in mortgage-backed securities. Now investors are left with a troubling question: If they can't count on big, well-established firms to operate hedge funds properly, whom can they count on?
LASTING DAMAGE?
For Bear and its 72-year-old chairman and chief executive, James E. Cayne, the findings could prove troubling. Warren Spector, then-president and co-chief operating officer, has already resigned his posts in the aftermath. The scandal could do lasting damage to Bear's once-mighty, mortgage-backed bond underwriting and trading businesses, says Frank Partnoy, a former Wall Street derivatives trader turned professor at the University of San Diego Law School. "It's hard to imagine the brand recovering," he says. "It's going to be a long road to get there." The SEC, meanwhile, is looking into the hedge funds, and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York in late September launched an investigation of its own.
Now the 84-year-old investment bank, long admired for its scrappy ways in a world once dominated by white-shoe elites, may begin to distance itself from Cioffi, who remains a paid adviser there. Cioffi, meanwhile, may have to fight off accusations that he was a rogue trader. He will likely seek to prove that the valuations he oversaw were reasonable and that his comments to investors weren't intentionally misleading. Bear Stearns spokesman Russell Sherman says the firm took precautions against a market downfall, but the decline in mortgage-backed securities was unprecedented.
The quick collapse of the inelegantly named Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies fund and High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage fund conjures memories of Long-Term Capital Management, the multibillion-dollar fund that blew up in 1998. In both cases, the damage helped ignite a worldwide credit crunch that prompted intervention by central bankers. But there's an important difference: LTCM, run by some of the sharpest minds in finance, was built to do well in rising and sinking markets alike. It failed because its impossibly complex trading strategies went haywire. The Bear funds cratered because their managers never came up with a Plan B to survive a downturn. Cioffi was more like a day trader chasing tech stocks in the late 1990s than the Nobel laureates at LTCM.
Ralph R. Cioffi seemed as cool and confident as ever. The market for subprime mortgages was crumbling, but the 51-year-old manager of two Bear Stearns (BSC) hedge funds offered nothing but reassurances to investors. "We're going to make money on this," he promised his wealthy patrons in February. "We don't believe what the markets are saying."
He should have known otherwise. The hedge funds were built so they were virtually guaranteed to implode if market conditions turned south, according to a BusinessWeek analysis of confidential financial statements for both funds and interviews with forensic accounting experts, traders, and analysts.
The funds had another potentially fatal flaw: an unusual arrangement with Barclays (BCS) that gave the giant British bank the power to yank the plugâa deal that ran counter to the interests of other investors, many of whom didn't even know about it.
The documents also cast serious doubt on the funds' supposedly strong performance before their July bankruptcies. More than 60% of their net worth was tied up in exotic securities whose reported value was estimated by Cioffi's own teamâsomething the funds' auditor, Deloitte & Touche, warned investors of in its 2006 report, released in May, 2007. What emerges from the records is a portrait of a cash-starved portfolio piled high with debt and managers all too eager to add to the heap.
Spotlight on Hedge Funds
The revelations shed new light on the murky dealings inside the booming $1.3 trillion hedge fund industry, which now accounts for up to a third of all daily trading on Wall Street. They seem to underscore critics' biggest complaint: that many hedge funds use astonishing amounts of leverage, or borrowed money, in sometimes reckless ways. The risks of "fair value" accounting, the practice that allows money managers to estimate the values of securities for which they can't find true market prices, are thrown into sharper focus as well. Coming soon, for better or worse: louder calls in Washington for more oversight of the largely unregulated hedge fund industry.
These new details could further damage the relationships that thousands of pension funds, university endowments, and wealthy individuals have with the Wall Street chieftains they entrust to manage their money. The Bear funds weren't stand-alone portfolios like the ones that blew up on Amaranth Advisors and Sowood Capital Management in recent yearsâthey carried the imprimatur of one of the Street's oldest and most storied firms. The funds marketed themselves with the implicit backing of Bear Stearns and played up the fact that they were run by its experts in mortgage-backed securities. Now investors are left with a troubling question: If they can't count on big, well-established firms to operate hedge funds properly, whom can they count on?
LASTING DAMAGE?
For Bear and its 72-year-old chairman and chief executive, James E. Cayne, the findings could prove troubling. Warren Spector, then-president and co-chief operating officer, has already resigned his posts in the aftermath. The scandal could do lasting damage to Bear's once-mighty, mortgage-backed bond underwriting and trading businesses, says Frank Partnoy, a former Wall Street derivatives trader turned professor at the University of San Diego Law School. "It's hard to imagine the brand recovering," he says. "It's going to be a long road to get there." The SEC, meanwhile, is looking into the hedge funds, and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York in late September launched an investigation of its own.
Now the 84-year-old investment bank, long admired for its scrappy ways in a world once dominated by white-shoe elites, may begin to distance itself from Cioffi, who remains a paid adviser there. Cioffi, meanwhile, may have to fight off accusations that he was a rogue trader. He will likely seek to prove that the valuations he oversaw were reasonable and that his comments to investors weren't intentionally misleading. Bear Stearns spokesman Russell Sherman says the firm took precautions against a market downfall, but the decline in mortgage-backed securities was unprecedented.
The quick collapse of the inelegantly named Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies fund and High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage fund conjures memories of Long-Term Capital Management, the multibillion-dollar fund that blew up in 1998. In both cases, the damage helped ignite a worldwide credit crunch that prompted intervention by central bankers. But there's an important difference: LTCM, run by some of the sharpest minds in finance, was built to do well in rising and sinking markets alike. It failed because its impossibly complex trading strategies went haywire. The Bear funds cratered because their managers never came up with a Plan B to survive a downturn. Cioffi was more like a day trader chasing tech stocks in the late 1990s than the Nobel laureates at LTCM.