Unstructured Finance

By Matthew Goldstein

With the mystery of the missing $600 million in customer funds at MF Global Financial still unresolved, a lot of customers of the failed futures firm are starting to complain about getting bounced checks.

It appears that 10 days ago, with speculation swirling that the Jon Corzine-led firm would soon file for bankruptcy, a good number of customers started to put in requests to pull their money from the New York-based outfit. But instead of simply wiring that money back to their customers, it seems MF Global tried to buy some time for itself by sending that money back via snail mail in the form of an old-fashioned check.

Those checks cut by the folks at MF Global began arriving in customer mailboxes this week, several days after the firm filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31 in New York federal court. And by the time customers started depositing those checks, they were rejected as having insufficient funds.

It’s not surprising the MF Global checks were rejected after the bankruptcy filing. It’s pretty customary for all expenses to require court approval once a bankruptcy judge gets involved.

But the move by MF Global to send back customer money by check has left a lot of customers in a bad predicament. I’ve been talking to one futures trader who says he and some of his associates have well over $1 million in bad checks issued by MF Global. Those checks were issued on Oct. 28–three days before the bankruptcy filing. The trader is considering producing a copy of the check as evidence of what he sees as MF Global’s bad faith in dealing with it customers and Wall Street’s broken system for dealing with customer money.

By Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan

The year is not yet over and already the confessions are starting to roll in from some of the biggest U.S. money managers.

Bill Gross, manager of the world’s biggest bond fund, sent out a “mea culpa” letter late Friday to his many mom-and-pop investors, saying he’s sorry for putting up such bad numbers this year. Mea culpas from Pimco’s guiding light and the self-styled “bond king” are rare, largely because his Total Return Fund has long been one of the industry’s top performers.

But this year has been a tough one for Gross, who guessed wrong by betting heavily against U.S. Treasuries, which have turned out to be one of the biggest out-performers of 2011. The fixed income guru, who helps manage more than $1.2 trillion at Pimco, wasn’t farsighted enough to foresee a flight to Treasuries prompted by events like the European debt crisis, the battle over the U.S. debt ceiling and the general anemic state of the global economy.

By Matthew Goldstein

Tyrone Gilliams Jr. wanted to live a larger than life story–with much of it playing out last year in videos he had produced and plastered all over the Internet. A year later, Gilliams true life drama has him fighting to maintain his freedom.

On Oct. 5, federal authorities arrested Gilliams and charged him with wire fraud in connection with a $4 million investment scheme that Reuters chronicled in a Special Report in May. As noted in yesterday’s arrest story, U.S. prosecutors in New York didn’t begin looking into Gilliams until Reuters reported that he allegedly had used some of his investors’ money to reinvent himself as a Philadelphia-area philanthropist.

Some might dismiss Gilliams as the architect of bizarre but  small-time scheme–especially when so many people across the country are suffering economic hardship. But as I point out in the below video, which  our ace online production team put together,  the sage of TL Gilliams may say more about our culture than we’d like to admit.

Early morning at Occupy Wall Street

Updated Oct. 5

By Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan

There’s been a lot of talk that other than rallying against bankers and corporate greed, the message coming from Occupy Wall Street isn’t a clear one. And many of the college students, artists, unemployed, transients who’ve set-up camp in a concrete plaza in  lower Manhattan wouldn’t disagree with that assessment.

In fact, many of the young protesters–mostly in their 20s–seem to embrace the notion that it’s hard to define just what Occupy Wall Street is all about and what it hopes to achieve. For many, sleeping on the streets and staging a “Zombie March,” or getting arrested for blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge is enough to bring attention to the fact that too many Americans are still suffering from the financial crisis.

“I’m here because in this recession, the rich have become richer — and it ties in to the bank bailouts,” says Dylan Bozlee, a college student from Hilo, Hawaii, who booked a one-way ticket to New York to join the protest. “Think about it? Wall Street got us into this huge mess, enabled by our government, and we are in the same state of affairs–recession.”

By Matthew Goldstein

For months now we’ve been hearing a lot about the $14 trillion in debt owed by the U.S. government. But there’s been far too little talk about the almost equally high debt tab owed by U.S. consumers.

The Federal Reserve recently reported that total outstanding debt owed by U.S. consumers was $11.4 trillion, down from its third-quarter 2008 peak of $12.5 trillion. At that pace, it could take years for U.S. consumers to delever, or in plain English–reduce the debts they owe on their homes, credit cards, autos and student loans. But when it comes to the staggering sum of consumer debt in this country, it’s pretty clear that time is not on our side.

In fact, the longer it takes for consumers to pay-down their debts, it simply means demand for homes, autos and other big ticket goods will remain lax. And that means the unemployment rate won’t get much lower than its current 9 percent rate anytime soon. In fact, with all the signs pointing to a double-dip recession, unemployment could very well inch higher in the next few months.

By Matthew Goldstein

All too much of what we do in financial journalism is rush around to get the “scoop” on some big announcement by some corporate chieftain. Things like, the announcement of a new product, a management reshuffling or a bunch of firings. All important stuff and all stuff that could impact earnings and stock movements. But sometimes the big picture of what really is working for a company or is ailing it, gets lost in the scoop chase.

So that’s why we took a step back to look at some potentially radical solutions for fixing Bank of America, which right now has come to represent much of what remains broken with the U.S. housing market.

The point of the story was to look at ideas that bank CEO Brian Moynihan might be reluctant to do. Ideas that would drive shareholders and bondholders batty. But the kind of ideas that ultimately may be necessary to not only fix the bank, but also repair the nation’s sick housing market and equally sick economy.

By Matthew Goldstein

So riddle me this: How did we go from blaming “banksters” for all our financial ills to now casting teachers, cops and firefighters as overpaid government slackers who are keeping an economic recovery from picking up steam?

Somewhere, somehow, the narrative of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression changed. Not too long ago, all the talk was about exotic securities backed by crappy mortgages, inadequate bank regulation, excessive CEO pay and burdensome consumer debt. Now the conversation in Washington and Wall Street is more focused on overly generous pensions for public employees and the levels of government spending on the poor, for education, new roads and middle class health benefits.

This isn’t too say that runaway government deficits aren’t a problem that need to be addressed–most likely with a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts. But the financial crisis didn’t begin in summer 2007 with concern about government spending.

By Matthew Goldstein

It’s been an ugly summer for hedge fund king John Paulson with two of his biggest funds down more than 25 percent. But what makes that poor performance all the more painful is how widespread it is being felt by wealthy individual investors around the globe.

Paulson’s flagship Advantage funds would appear to be exclusive terrain with a $10 million investment requirement. But that hefty entrance fee is something of a veneer because many of Paulson’s investors have gained entrance to his kingdom by plunking down as little as $100,000. That’s because Paulson’s Advantage funds are some of the most widely sold hedge fund portfolios on distribution platforms maintained by Wall Street firms, European banks and small investment advisory firms around the globe.

Paulson has built a powerful internal marketing force to make sure there is a steady stream of money from wealthy individual investors trying to get into his funds. This was one of the more surprising things my colleagues Jennifer Ablan, Svea Herbst-Bayliss and I found when we began taking a close look at Paulson’s problems this year.

By Matthew Goldstein

A few weeks ago S&P telegraphed that it would soon strip the U.S. of its vaunted Triple A rating and downgrade the government’s debt by a slight notch to AA+. And Friday night, the major credit rating did just as it telegraphed.

For the moment, let’s not debate whether S&P is engaging in politics, or should even be in the business of rating the debt of countries. The latter issue, however, is something that our nation’s political leaders and regulators may want to consider at some point.

But for right now, it’s worth noting that over the past decade or so, S&P has moved on downgrading corporate debt and esoteric securities as if it was still operating in the days of the telegraph.

By Matthew Goldstein

Hedge fund titan John Paulson has a shrinkage problem.

The billionaire manager’s flagship Paulson Advantage funds are quickly losing altitude after peaking with $19.1 billion in assets under management in March. As of the other day, the combined AUM of the Paulson Advantage and Advantage Plus funds had fallen to $15.7 billion, according to investor sources.

The Advantage funds account for roughly 44 percent of the $35. 2 billon in assets under management at Paulson. The two so-called event driven funds  long have been the manager’s largest.

And the July performance numbers for the Advantage funds should be ugly. A source tells us the Advantage Plus fund, which is a leveraged version of the plain vanilla flagship fund, was down 4.63 percent in July. With that decline, the Advantage Plus fund is down a little over 21.6 percent for the year. The plain vanilla Advantage fund is believed to be down around 15 percent for the year.