In 2008, the collapse of major lenders and investors set the fire of the global financial crisis. Recently, Wall Street announced a similar activity, its latest trillion-dollar idea that involves slicing and dicing debt tied to single-family homes and selling the bonds to investors around the world.
Investing in Real Estate is Back… And in a Big Way
Hedge Fund Advertising: Why hasn’t the CFTC kept pace with SEC JOBS Act implementation?
According to hedge fund lobbyists, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) may be blocking more than $3 billion in private investment.
Hedge Funds Place More Bets on Startups
As of the past two years, tech startups became increasingly more attractive in the eyes of some very wealth suitors—hedge funds.
A recent example of this attraction is Snapchat, the popular photo-messaging startup. After refusing a $3 billion dollar buyout offer from Facebook, Snapchat received $50 million in Series C funding from Coatue Management, a hedge fund.
The Federal Reserve Approves Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan’s Capital Management Plans
In early December, two Wall Street giants, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, finally satisfied the Federal Reserve’s stiffer requirement with improved capital plans. The banks successfully put the matter behind them by resubmitting capital plans after the regulators found “significant weaknesses” in the ones submitted in March during a stress test. “We are pleased that the Fed determined” the bank’s stress test “process improvements met their expectations,” JPMorgan’s chief executive Jamie Dimon said in a statement.
Volcker Rule challenged in Court: Will Regulators Accede or Demur?
The American Banker’s Association (ABA) filed a petition on December 24, 2013, in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia challenging a provision of the recently approved final version of the Volcker Rule (the Final Rule) requiring community banks to divest their holdings in a commonly held debt instrument known as Collateralized Debt Obligation backed by Trust-Preferred Securities or TruPS-backed CDO.
Master Limited Partnerships, newly re-discovered investment structures, are on the rise
A Master Limited Partnership (MLP) is a publicly traded partnership (PTP). It is essentially a partnership, or a limited liability company (LLC) that has chosen partnership taxation, that trades on a public exchange (NYSE, NASDAQ, etc.) or over the counter market.
“Apple is not a bank”, says activist shareholder Carl Icahn
Since August 2013, the activist shareholder Carl Icahn – the second richest person in America and a man who made his fortune on Wall Street – has been pushing Apple to give some of its huge piles of dollars back to shareholders through a share repurchase program of up to around $150 billion.
CFTC Announces Cross-Border Substituted Compliance Determinations, Provides Limited Phase-In for Some Swap Requirements
On Friday, just ahead of the expiration of the CFTC’s exemptive order delaying the applicability of some CFTC swap regulations for non-U.S. swap dealers and foreign branches of U.S. swap dealers, the CFTC issued a press release and summary table announcing comparability determinations that will allow non-U.S. swap dealers and foreign branches of U.S. swap dealers to comply with local law instead of CFTC requirements in cases where substituted compliance is available under the CFTC’s cross-border guidance.
A Pension Dispute Could Have Billion-Dollar Implications for Private Equity Investors
The Obama administration has been fighting to eliminate a “tax loophole” that benefits private equity executives by taxing their profits from investments in companies (“carried interest”) by the capital gains rate of 20 percent instead of the regular income rate of nearly 40 percent. Congress has kept this from happening, but the decision in a recent case by the Federal Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Massachusetts might put enough power in the hands of the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service to win the fight.
M&A Revisited: BlackBerry Abandons Sales Plan, Looks Towards Future
On November 4th, 2013, BlackBerry announced that it would forgo its plan to sell its business. Instead, the company has decided to replace its CEO Thorsten Heins and obtain a $1 billion cash injection from private placement of convertible debentures. The news was followed by another plunge of BlackBerry’s share price – it dropped 16.4% to a price of $6.49, well below the buyout price of $9 a share offered by Fairfax earlier this year. Has the former phone giant lost yet another battle?