Unstructured Finance

By Matthew Goldstein

Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio is really bullish on stocks and all things risky–at least he was in early January.

A few weeks ago, our competitors at Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal did a good job reporting on Dalio’s macro market thesis for 2013 when they got a transcript of an investor call (Bloomberg) and a sneak peak at Bridgewater Associates’ year-end report to investors (WSJ). But after taking my own recent look at Bridgewater’s year-end investor note–book is probably a better description for the 300-page plus bound treatise–you realize that bullish just doesn’t describe Bridgewater’s stance going in 2013.

Here’s a sampler of some of Bridgewater’s comments to investors:

“Cash in the developed world is a terrible asset.” “We would be short cash of all the major developed currencies” And this: “Bonds will be a lousy investment but cash will be worse.”

OK, we get it. Dalio really hates cash–or at least holding too much of it in his Pure Alpha and All Weather portfolios, which combined have $141 billion in assets. BTW, Pure Alpha was up .8% last year, while All Weather was up 14.7%.

So just what does Dalio, who likes to play things close to the vest and security-protects his firm’s daily research notes, see as the thing to do with all that cash? Well, buy stocks and other risky assets–especially with the Federal Reserve intent on keeping interest rates as low as it can.

By Matthew Goldstein 

The year is young, but so far its been a rough one for bearish stock investors with the S&P 500 is up 7.25% The surge in equity prices has left  a lot of short sellers–traders who bet on a stock sliding in value–with glum looks on their faces. And it’s with that bullish backdrop that several dozen of Jim Chanos’ closest friends gather in Miami for the noted short seller’s annual meeting of the bears.

The gathering of 40 or so people from Wednesday through Friday is a chance for Chanos and other like minded investors to kick around their best short ideas. A year ago, there was a lot of talk about shorting companies in the natural gas space.

The annual event at a resort in West South Beach is one where the invited guests are sworn to secrecy. That’s why there’s almost never any press coverage of the event, and even less coverage of the short ideas presented by Chanos & Co.

By Matthew Goldstein

Don’t be surprised if President Obama includes a line or two in his State of Union address this evening about the need for a plan to allow millions of struggling homeowners whose mortgages are packaged into so-called private label mortgage-backed securities to get a chance to either refinance their loans or restructure them.

The Washington Post is reporting today that mortgage refinancing may be one of the laundry list of items Obama will talk about tonight. And for several months now, investors in private mortgage-securities–deals issued by Wall Street banks and financial firms and not guaranteed by Fannie or Freddie–have been quietly bracing for the Obama administration to move forward with a new refinancing effort.

Up until now, the federal government’s main attempts at trying to help homeowners take advantage of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to keep pushing interest rates to zero has been to prod banks and mortgage servicers to refinance home loans held in so-called agency debt guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie. But programs like HAMP and HARP have provided little relief to the millions of homeowners whose loans are held in private label securities.

A beautiful spring day in the NYC metro area. Let’s Go Mets! Here’s this weekend’s stories courtesy of Sam Forgione.

From The New York Times: 

Jennifer Medina reports that California’s economy is either booming and busting, depending on which city you’re in.

From The Nation: 

William Greider has some suggestions on how the Federal Reserve can work with politicians to improve the housing crisis.

By Matthew Goldstein

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen in Florida, has evoked a lot of debate about race in America and the nation’s attitudes to what it means to be a minority.

There’s been a good deal written that major media organizations were slow to react to this tragic story, in part because there simply aren’t enough minority voices on staff. This point was highlighted recently in a  story in The New York Times

That said, minorities also are underrepresented in the industry I spend most of my time writing about—Wall Street. And while it’s no secret that there are few minorities in the executives suites on Wall Street—there are not that many women, either—it’s worth taking look at some disturbing statistics.

By Jennifer Ablan and Matthew Goldstein

Paul McCulley says working at bond giant PIMCO was like being in Camelot. But in some ways, Bill Gross’s former top Federal Reserve watcher seems a lot happier and more at peace with himself since leaving the Newport Beach, Calif.-based firm at the end of 2010.

These days McCulley, who is credited with coining the phrase “shadow banking” to describe the role Wall Street banks and hedge funds play in pumping liquidity into the financial system, looks more like a professor at some liberal arts college than a once mighty money manager of some $50 billion.

His hair is long—down to his shoulders. He sports a beard and has lost 20 pounds. He regularly walks 8 miles a day and spends as much time fishing as he does thinking about ways to get the U.S. economy out of its current liquidity trap—a situation in which all the Fed’s priming of the pump does little until consumers can get relief from all the mortgage and credit card debt they accumulated in the past decade.

By Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan

The thing about deposition excerpts—even lengthy ones—is that some of the tantalizing material gets left on the cutting room floor. And that’s certainly the case with hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen’s two-days worth of  testimony in the long-running Fairfax Financial litigation.

Now don’t get us wrong—there is plenty of great and illuminating stuff in the 242 pages of deposition testimony Reuters obtained through a court motion to unseal documents in the civil lawsuit. As we noted in our story, Cohen is pressed at great length for his views on insider trading—he thinks the laws are “vague”. And as we highlighted in our blog, there’s even an amusing little feud between the lawyers over how the SAC Capital founder should addressed.

Still, it makes you wonder what was said by Cohen in the more than 400 pages of deposition transcript that wasn’t unsealed. And we’d love to see Cohen on videotape as sometimes body language can be revealing.

By Matthew Goldstein

Bad data continues to confound the U.S. government in its measurement of the economy, with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York noting it too has been a victim.

In the Fed’s most recent report on outstanding consumer debt, the nation’s central bank said it recently discovered it had been underestimating the total dollar amount of student loan debt for a number of years. In the report, the NY Fed said some of the under-counting may have stemmed from the methodology used by one of its vendors.

The Fed said it has fixed the problem, which was a significant one. The Fed says it may have been under-estimating outstanding student loan debt by some $290 billion.