How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stepped off the elevator into the Third Avenue offices of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. It was July 21, 2008, and market fears were mounting. Four months earlier, Bear Stearns Cos. had sold itself for just $10 a share to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)
Now, amid tumbling home prices and near-record foreclosures, attention was focused on a new source of contagion: Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac, which together had more than $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and other debt outstanding, Bloomberg Markets reports in its January issue.
Paulson had been pushing a plan in Congress to open lines of credit to the two struggling firms and to grant authority for the Treasury Department to buy equity in them. Yet he had told reporters on July 13 that the firms must remain shareholder owned and had testified at a Senate hearing two days later that giving the government new power to intervene made actual intervention improbable.
“If you have a bazooka, and people know you have it, you’re not likely to take it out,” he said.
On the morning of July 21, before the Eton Park meeting, Paulson had spoken to New York Times reporters and editors, according to his Treasury Department schedule. A Times article the next day said the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were inspecting Fannie and Freddie’s books and cited Paulson as saying he expected their examination would give a signal of confidence to the markets.
A Different Message
At the Eton Park meeting, he sent a different message, according to a fund manager who attended. Over sandwiches and pasta salad, he delivered that information to a group of men capable of profiting from any disclosure.
Around the conference room table were a dozen or so hedge- fund managers and other Wall Street executives -- at least five of them alumni of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), of which Paulson was chief executive officer and chairman from 1999 to 2006. In addition to Eton Park founder Eric Mindich, they included such boldface names as Lone Pine Capital LLC founder Stephen Mandel, Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital Management LP and Daniel Och of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC.
After a perfunctory discussion of the market turmoil, the fund manager says, the discussion turned to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson said he had erred by not punishing Bear Stearns shareholders more severely. The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” -- a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.
Stock Wipeout
Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So too would the various classes of preferred stock, he said.
The fund manager says he was shocked that Paulson would furnish such specific information -- to his mind, leaving little doubt that the Treasury Department would carry out the plan. The managers attending the meeting were thus given a choice opportunity to trade on that information.
There’s no evidence that they did so after the meeting; tracking firm-specific short stock sales isn’t possible using public documents.
- Talks At Google: Secretary Hank Paulson: "hank: 5 Years From The Brink"
Link to video: Secretary Hank Paulson: "Hank: 5 Years from the Brink"Secretary Hank Paulson joins us in conversation about his new documentary. HANK: 5 Years from the Brink tells the story of how Paulson worked to persuade banks, Congress, and presidential...
- Notes From The John Paulson Call - By Joshua Brown
Using my advanced ninja skills I got myself onto the Bank of America Wealth Management-hosted conference call starring John Paulson of Paulson & Co this evening. The notoriously press- and attention-shy Paulson agreed to be on the call a week after...
- Paulson Forgoes Prognostication As Greatest Trade Sequel Flops
John Paulson, founder of Paulson & Co., one of the world’s largest hedge funds, has close-cut black hair, dark eyes and a soft voice. There’s a fuss when he arrives, befitting a man who made one of the biggest fortunes in Wall Street history,...
- Dalio Takes Hedge Crown From Soros
Ray Dalio has overtaken George Soros as the world’s most successful hedge fund manager after his Bridgewater Pure Alpha fund made $13.8bn for investors last year. The profits made by the Connecticut-based Pure Alpha – already the world’s biggest...
- Say Goodbye To Fannie And Freddie - By William Poole
Found via The Big Picture. THE Federal National Mortgage Association — known as Fannie Mae — and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation — Freddie Mac — were poorly structured from the time, 40 years ago, when they were set up as so-called...