bear stearns两家大型基金可能因次级债面临关门

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Two Big Funds
At Bear Stearns
Face ShutdownBy KATE KELLY, SERENA NG and DAVID REILLY
June 19, 2007 10:02 p.m.

Two big hedge funds at Bear Stearns Cos. moved toward the brink of closing down last night as a bailout plan developed over several days fell apart in a drama that could have wide-ranging consequences for Wall Street and investors.
The funds, which once controlled more than $20 billion in a combination of investor and lender money, have swooned in recent weeks amid weakness in the market for subprime mortgages, or risky homes loans. Both had invested heavily in various securities backed by subprime loans, betting that a popular index tracking the loans would fall and that certain securities backed by pools of mortgages would retain their value.
After encountering opposition to a bailout plan the fund's managers presented Monday, Bear executives spent much of Tuesday negotiating with lenders to unwind a series of loans. By early evening, the funds had effectively paid down $2.25 billion of their $9 billion in outstanding credit. The first two lenders to exit their positions, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp., agreed to unwind complicated transactions with Bear without dumping lots of bonds on the broader market. A Bank of America spokesman had no comment.
By unwinding those loans in an orderly manner, rather than through a series of fire-sale auctions, Bear's fund managers, led by veteran bond salesman Ralph Cioffi, could help stave off painful ripple effects in the broader market for mortgage-backed securities and related instruments. Because such securities can be thinly traded, it is often hard to find their true valuation, making players in those markets vulnerable to inventory gluts that could depress prices across the board.
Merrill, on the other hand, moved toward seizing assets, though its plans still could change. Earlier in the day, senior executives in the brokerage's fixed-income group opted to revive a planned auction for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of collateral from the Bear funds, according to traders and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The planned auction, which was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, involved the sale of more than $850 million in assets, according to the documents. It had originally been conceived as a smaller-scale auction of $400 million in collateral to have occurred on Monday and Tuesday.
The rescue plan, presented at Bear's Madison Avenue headquarters on Monday afternoon, involved a $1.5 billion loan from the fund's parent company to be backed by the two funds' assets, as well as an infusion of $500 million in new equity capital from various existing lenders, including Citigroup Inc. and Barclay's PLC. It would have reduced each creditor's risk profile by 15%, the fund's managers argued, but it carried with it a stiff requirement in return: that no lender initiate a margin call, or request for additional cash or collateral, for a 12-month period. Some creditors found those ground rules unacceptable, prompting them to seek a quicker exit.

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