International Investing

From Yahoo:
The turmoil in the global credit markets claimed another victim on Thursday as Caliber Global Investment, a London-listed fund, said it would sell its assets and return capital to investors following losses related to risky US subprime mortgages.
…
Also on Thursday, Carlyle Group, the US private equity company, delayed at the last minute the flotation [...]

From the WSJ.
According to Cap Gemini and Merrill Lynch’s World Wealth Report, issued Wednesday, the rich cut their exposure dramatically to “alternative investments” — a class that includes hedge funds, private equity, structured products, venture capital and currencies.
In 2005, the world’s financial millionaires (those with investible assets of $1 million or more, not including primary [...]

Harry Kay featured in this New Yorker article provides some answers:
Kat followed through on his hedge fund skepticism by conducting two hedge fund related studies. The first, published in the June 2003 Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, looked at the fee-adjusted returns of 77 funds from 1990-2000 in relation to returns generated by market [...]

For good reason, the economist Murray Rothbard warned about the State collecting economic statistics. He knew that who ever collected the numbers would have incentive to politicize them (eg COLA). And besides manipulations the State would use the statistics as an excuse to expand its reach in order to “manage” the numbers.
Laws, of course, do [...]

This graphic is from The Gartman Letter. Guru Dennis Gartman finds BOA near a technical breaking point:

FT reports on this long over-due instrument:
Investors who fear that high diamond prices may not be forever will soon have help at hand.
Bankers and diamond experts are to launch two initiatives in the coming days to create the world’s first derivatives contracts linked to diamond prices.
The move could inject new price clarity into the diamond [...]

Now KKR wants to IPO?
In my opinion, Blackstone was just in time. I wonder if Blackstone quietly passed some money to help Bear Stearns take the hit for its two blown-up CDO funds.
A loud ‘pop’ in the market for CDOs would ratchet up bond yields yet again, squeezing Blackstone’s bottom line and badly marring its [...]

The WSJ:
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., a lender to Bear’s hedge funds, was scheduled to begin an afternoon auction of collateral it held from the Bear fund, mainly mortgage-backed debt. Minutes before the sales were to begin, the firm pulled back. Later, J.P. Morgan came to terms with Bear to eliminate its exposure to Bear’s [...]

Trading guru Dennis Gartman brings up the issue in his newletter:
The simple truth is that China reduced its holdings of US treasury securities more in April than it has at any time in at least seven years according to the Shanghai Securities News of earlier this week. We tend to believe that, for this is [...]

The chairman of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Nobuo Yamaguchi, yesterday recommended “yen-buying intervention by the Ministry of Finance” to stop the yen’s slide against virtually all other currencies.
Japanese corporations are not normally a hotbed of activism in terms of boosting the yen.
While a lot of people are unhappy with the Bank of [...]