SUBPRIME SATAN IN HEDGE FUND HELL

Date: Friday, December 28, 2007
Author: New York Post

MOVE over, banks, it's time for hedge funds to worry about subprime loans and such.

"They haven't been under the same pressure as public companies to own up" to problems, said Chris Whalen, who runs The Institutional Risk Analyst newsletter.

But with the year's end upon us, the hedgies will now be 'fessing up and reporting problems to clients.

And Whalen thinks hedge funds could have much greater susceptibility to bad derivatives than the banks that have been hogging the headlines these past few months.

In fact, some hedge funds could be at the mercy of the hemorrhaging financial institutions that sold them the derivatives.

Hedge funds could have 70 cents of every $1 of derivative securities sitting on their books. The 30 cents remaining on the books of Wall Street institutions in many cases represent just the remnants of unsold securities.

You might have noticed that Wall Street firms have been taking billions in write-offs for bad loans in the past six months.

As I've written before, part of the reason for these huge hits is that banks - which often own brokerage firms - can no longer absolve their outside auditors of mistakes. As such, auditing firms have probably been playing hardball with write-offs.

Will financial institutions be equally hard on the hedge funds that bought derivatives from them?

I don't know. But "if the broker tells a hedge fund to write it off, the hedge fund is dead," Whalen said.

* Barry Bonds, Andy Pettitte and all the other baseballers who destroid their reputations with accusations of drug use can thank the shamed musical group Milli Vanilli for not suffering severe financial losses.

Milli Vanilli, you might remember, was that singing group in the late 1980s that really wasn't doing any singing.

After the Grammy award-winning duo was found to be lip-synching, all hell broke loose.

More than two dozen lawsuits were filed for consumer fraud and a settlement was eventually reached in which concertgoers could demand refunds because the group wasn't delivering on its promises of entertainment.

But few people asked for their money back.

So why aren't baseball fans suing these steroid-accused players?

I called a lawyer last week to find out.

James Rosener, a lawyer with Pepper Hamilton in New York, doesn't rule out "the theory of fraudulent performance" in the baseball situation.

But he said there is no contractual relationship between the players and the fans - just the team and the fans.

"The gripe I have is with the team for not giving me what I paid for, which is an honest and fair event," said Rosener.

I agree.

When a pitcher hums a fastball I'd like to know that he's responsible for the humming - and not pulling a "Milli Vanilli" on me.

An interesting fact: There was a 38 percent surge in departures of chief executives in November, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

A number of the CEOs, as you might suspect, were victims of the global credit crisis.