Talking straight with money managers, policy makers and econ gurus
By Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan
We may not be TV people but there’s something to be said for just sitting down and doing a video interview to discuss the big issues of the day. And that’s just what we did as part of this year’s Reuters Investment Outlook Summit and it’s something we hope to keep doing as a regular feature going forward into the new year.
In advance of this year’s summit, we did videos with noted short-seller Carson Block, bond guru Dan Fuss, OWS bank leader Cathy O’Neill, FBI heads April Brooks and David Chaves, Avenue Capital’s Marc Lasry, economist Henry Kaufman and Steven Gluckstern of eminent domain fame. The videos were frank discussions and to make them seem more natural we went outside the environs of our Reuters newsroom in NYC and conducted them in places like the middle of Times Square, an ice ream shop and a park.
Eminent domain or principal reductions, the bottom line is reducing mortgage debt
By Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan
It’s been almost six months since we first reported on the plan by Mortgage Resolution Partners to find a community willing to use eminent domain to condemn and restructure underwater mortgages and pay a handsome fee to the private investment group for overseeing this process. The proposal has generated a lot interest, debate and heat, but so far no community is yet willing to go down this road.
Still, Steven Gluckstern, chief executive of the San Francisco-based group, said he’s confident that by early next year some community–most likely one in California–will go forward with the idea of condemning underwater mortgages and rewriting them so cash-strapped homeowners can afford the payments and stay in their homes.
Occupy Wall Street leader keeps heat on politicians
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Cathy O’Neil, the organizer of the Occupy Wall Street alternative bank group, likes to call herself a “math nerd,” who is looking to do something meaningful with her academic training.
The former Barnard College math professor and former quantitative hedge fund analyst is the guiding force behind a group that is trying to keep OWS a relevant movement now that last year’s protests in lower Manhattan over income inequality are something of a distant memory.
FBI uses Twitter, social media to look for securities fraud
By Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan
(Reuters) – The FBI sees social media as a potential breeding ground for securities fraud, and has agents scouring Twitter and Facebook for tips, according to two top agents overseeing a long-running investigation into insider trading in the $2 trillion hedge fund industry.
April Brooks, a special agent in charge of the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and David Chaves, a supervisory agent, said it is hard to predict the next wave of securities fraud, but they add that it will have a lot to do with advances in technology and social media.
Reuters Summit-Occupy Wall St leader keeps heat on politicians
NEW YORK, Nov 26 (Reuters) – Cathy O’Neil, the organizer of
the Occupy Wall Street alternative bank group, likes to call
herself a “math nerd,” who is looking to do something meaningful
with her academic training.
The former Barnard College math professor and former
quantitative hedge fund analyst is the guiding force behind a
group that is trying to keep OWS a relevant movement now that
last year’s protests in lower Manhattan over income inequality
are something of a distant memory.
Becoming comfortably numb to income inequality
By Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan
About a year ago, Nobel Prize-winning liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz made a surprise appearance at the Occupy Wall Street camp site in Zuccotti Park, giving a speech to rally the protestors and support their causes of bringing attention to the economic divide between the 1 percent and everyone else in the U.S.
Today, the protestors in lower Manhattan have all but disappeared with the attention on Occupy Wall Street gone along with it.
Stiglitz: Obama, Romney still need to address housing market
By Jennifer Ablan and Matthew Goldstein
(Reuters) – Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz chided U.S. President Barack Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for not seriously addressing the troubled U.S. housing market during the recent series of presidential debates.
The Columbia University economics professor said in an interview with Reuters TV that the two men have shied away from discussing the uneven U.S. housing market recovery because neither has concrete solutions for helping financially strapped homeowners and both are wary of offending the banks.
Some Hedge Funds Throwing in Keys as “Landlords”
By Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan
All year the big money has been talking up one of the more intriguing trades to emerge from the housing crisis: buying up foreclosed homes in large scale and rent those out for several years and then unload them when the price is right. But questions about the so-called rent-to-own trade are being raised now that an early mover in the space, hedge fund giant Och-Ziff Capital, is looking to cash in its chips now and is abandoning the idea of operating foreclosed homes as rental properties for years to come.
Now we’re not quite ready to declare the foreclosed home rent-to-own trade is dead as the tireless, prolific financial bloggers at ZeroHedge did in a good riff on our exclusive story on Och-Ziff’s decision. But Daniel Och’s concern that the income to be generated from renting out foreclosed homes may not be as high as originally anticipated bears close scrutiny because it could spell trouble for other hedge funds, private equity firms and smaller money managers counting on rental income to generate an annual 8 pct or greater return on investment.
Exclusive: Och-Ziff hedge fund looks to exit landlord business
NEW YORK (Reuters) – One of the first big hedge funds to try to profit from a rebound in the U.S. housing market by investing in foreclosed homes is looking to cash out, even as other institutional investors are still getting in.
Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC, the $31 billion hedge fund led by Daniel Och, recently told its investment partner, 643 Capital Management, that it wants to exit from the foreclosed homes business, said several people familiar with the matter.
Citi’s CEO Pandit exits abruptly after board clash
By Matthew Goldstein, Carrick Mollenkamp and Rob Cox
(Reuters) – Citigroup Inc’s Vikram Pandit quit as chief executive on Tuesday after months of simmering tensions with the board – an abrupt change that surprised investors and employees of the third-largest U.S. bank.
Pandit told Reuters the decision to leave was his own, and that he had been contemplating the move for some time.
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