Courtesy of Pam Martens
New York Stock Exchange Trading Floor
On August 22 Bloomberg News reported that Goldman Sachs is shuttering two hedge funds run out of Asia with approximately $1.4 billion in total assets. Goldman Sachs isn’t shuttering the funds because the Volcker Rule restricts its ownership of hedge funds but because, according to the report, one Goldman partner running one fund is retiring and the other is starting his own fund.
Yesterday, Bloomberg News reported that JPMorgan Chase’s asset management division is liquidating “a $1 billion credit hedge fund” known as the Palm Lane Credit Opportunities Fund. The article said that “JPMorgan didn’t give a reason for the decision and a spokeswoman for the fund declined to comment.”
A filing by Palm Lane Credit Opportunities Fund on August 24 of this year at the SEC, shows the hedge fund registered offshore in the Cayman Islands, and says its first offering to investors came on July 1, 2012. That was two years after the Volcker Rule’s restriction on hedge fund ownership was signed into law. A Senior Portfolio Manager at the fund has a LinkedIn page stating that the fund invests in “non-directional opportunities in the CLO [Collateralized Loan Obligation], CDS [Credit Default Swap], credit correlation, illiquids and leveraged loan markets” – not exactly the sort of things you want a taxpayer-backstopped bank to be dabbling in.
Americans were led to believe that the Volcker Rule (named after former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker), which was part of the much ballyhooed Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation signed into law by President Obama in 2010, had put an end to giant Wall Street banks holding Federally insured deposits while engaging in high-risk proprietary trading (trading for the house). It also banned depository banks from owning material amounts of hedge funds and private equity funds where speculative trading occurs and where serious losses can be hidden.
So what are these big Wall Street insured depository institutions doing still owning hedge funds with billions of dollars in assets?
…
