Explosive Hidden Leverage Threatens To Blow Up The Markets
Wolf Richter
Testosteronepit.com
WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 2014
We don’t know what hedge fund manager Steven Cohen will do with the money he’s borrowing from Goldman Sachs’s GS Private Bank. We don’t even know how much he’s borrowing. But it’s a lot, given that the personal loan is backed by his collection of impressionist, modern, and contemporary art estimated to be worth $1 billion. The only reason we know about the loan at all is because Bloomberg dug up a notice Goldman filed with the Connecticut Secretary of the State, claiming he’d pledged “certain items of fine art” as part of a security agreement.
Goldman and Cohen go back a long ways. It provided prime brokerage services to his hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors that pleaded guilty last year to insider trading charges and agreed to pay $1.8 billion in penalties and stop managing money for outsiders, which will reduce the fund to a family office managing $9 billion to $11 billion of Cohen’s personal fortune.
Cohen made $2.4 billion in 2013, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha List of hedge fund managers, in second place, behind David Tepper ($3.5 billion) and ahead of John Paulson ($2.3 billion). Wouldn’t that be enough without having to borrow more? And what might he be doing with all this borrowed moolah? He won’t need that much to make ends meet when his electricity bill comes due.
In the rarefied air where these art loans take place, they have unique advantages: clients get to keep their art on the wall, and interest rates are about 2.5% – thanks to the Fed’s indefatigable efforts to come up with policies that enrich this very class of success stories. This is where the Fed’s otherwise illusory “wealth effect” is actually effective.
So why borrow money?
“A number of hedge fund guys who manage their money wisely, they look to put their art collections to work,” explained Michael Plummer, co-founder of New York-based consultant Artvest Partners and former COO at Christie’s Financial Services. “If you can get liquidity out of your collection and pay only 250 basis points,” he said, “it just makes sense.”
The Rest…HERE
