Jim Chanos su Moody's

in Cina ci sono oggi qualcosa come 50 società che producono auto, cinquanta ! E non è che i giapponesi, coreani o tedeschi o anche francesi non vendano o non mettano su fabbriche di auto in Cina è ovvio che ne sopravviveranno due o tre di quotate ce n'è un paio come Brilliance Automotive, cinese quotata a NY, magari è l'unica che sopravvive, altrimenti è un candidato per la bancarotta

Più che gli hedge fund che continuano a fare quello che han sempre fatto e che soffriranno solamente perchè molti new comers sono più deboli dei loro predecessori,anch'io penso che tra i private equity si annidino colossali flop futuri. E' notizia di oggi che il fondo Alchemy Partners sta pensando di rilevare i marchi Jaguar e Land Rover dalla Ford. Ma come si puo pensare che in un settore maturo come quello automobilistico,in cui ci sono delle eccellenze planetarie come Toyota e Wolkswagen, arrivino dei "quisque de populo " qualsiasi e siano in grado di costruire un successo imprenditoriale? So che c'è un ETF che investe sulle società acquisite dai Private Equity. E' il mio suggerimento a Jim Chanos per un short selling. Hobi

Jim Chanos e' il gestore che ha scoperto la truffa di Enron nel 2001 e da dieci anni almeno e' il miglior gestore di hedge funds ribassista del mondo. Questo e' uno che pur vendendo solo al ribasso ha continuato a guadagnare anche negli ultimi anni, una specie di genio insomma, ma per quello che ho visto quando pubblicano qualcosa su di lui e' un killer, quando prende di mira una societa' spesso poi si scopre che sotto c'e' del marcio vedi ultimamente Party Gaming a Londra Da dieci giorni Jim Chanos di colpo si fa intervistare dappertutto per parlare di tutti i titoli su cui sta sparando, un fatto raro perche' i grossi fondi ribassisti non pubblicizzano quasi mai (per paura delle "short squeeze" in un mercato toro), un sintomo che sente venuto il momento di premere alla grande Altre sue idee short: Macquarie, ^FFH, Kodak, Palm, l'acciaio, i produttori di auto cinesi...#http://ddo.typepad.com/ddo/2005/12/jim_chanos_nega.html^ ------------------- June 8 2007 Jim Chanos is the founder and president of Kynikos Associates, the world's largest dedicated short-selling hedge fund. He formed Kynikos in 1985 and has bet against companies involved in a string of corporate meltdowns, such as Commodore International and Tyco International. Perhaps most celebrated of all was his early bet against Enron after being puzzled by the company's accounting a year before its collapse in late 2001. But even he admits: "We didn't think it was a fraud until very much near the end of the saga." His recent public short picks include Macquarie Bank and Moody's Investors Service. Mr Chanos is also chairman of the Coalition of Private Investment Companies, a hedge fund lobby group. Below are highlights from his video interview with FT.com. There are few pure short sellers working right now. Is it a hard area to specialise in given the long-running bull market? We like to say we're the embodiment of survivorship bias but I think it's a very difficult way to make a living on Wall Street, which is why a lot of people don't do it. I hope it remains a difficult way to make a living, because hopefully more people won't do it. Having said that, I think that there has been winnowing out of the herd, if you will. It probably peaked out, in terms of dedicated short selling funds on Wall Street, in 1990. And then there was another culling of the herd in 2000. What's your [short selling] case against Moody's? Moody's is a simple story. It's structured finance. My argument against Moody's is that they are no longer a referee on the playing field, they are actually playing at this point. So although they are wearing an umpire's outfit, they have a Yankees hat on and I think that's the real problem, in that they are so entwined in the structured finance business. What was behind your bet on online gaming? Was it a political insight? Not really. All I had to do was read the prospectuses of some of the companies that went public in London. They should have put a skull and crossbones on Party Gaming's . . . The prospectuses clearly said that under US law their activities may be deemed to have been illegal, which is what happened. There was [another] point that people missed. The concerns from law enforcement were not just due to gambling. We talked to law enforcement people who were not involved with the investigation but who knew the law and knew the concerns, and the real concern was money laundering. I think that's still a concern in this area. What's your view on hedge fund regulation? Most participants in the industry understand that an increased amount of regulatory oversight is inevitable. The structure of that is what's up for debate . . . As hedge funds have taken more public money in the form of pension fund and endowment money, that has raised the level of scrutiny in Washington. If it was just wealthy individuals, I don't think Washington would be as concerned, but now that there's union money, pension fund money, endowment money in hedge funds there's a certain level of responsibility. We are experiencing a boom in private equity right now. Is it sustainable? It's sustainable as long as the easy credit is there - that's what's driving it. It's not, as many people believe, that the stock market is inexpensive, in fact on a lot of measures the stock market is probably as expensive, broadly, as it's ever been. What's driving it is easy credit availability and, as importantly, the boom in structured finance, whereby lenders are parcelling out the loans in various collateralised obligations and investors are buying small pieces as they see fit. It's diffused the risk but the risk has not been eliminated. So are we living through a new benign paradigm? No. We've seen all of this before. It will probably take something similar to a Drexel Burnham-United Airlines which ended in the late 1980s to unwind this or at least put fear back into the marketplace. It will be a failed deal of some sort. When will that happen? I don't know. If I did I would really be positioned correctly, but there are a few signs that are out there that I think are a little disconcerting . . . I have a real problem with private equity in that it rests upon an amazing discontinuity and arrogance, which is that the stock market is completely and totally under-priced at all times . . . To think that the stock market is just so stupid, at all times, across all companies and all industries, that private equity can come in and pay almost any price to buy these companies, is a pretty shaky assumption. I wouldn't want to short companies down 30 per cent routinely, invite my competition to short them with me and then advertise to the world what I'm doing. No one in their right mind would give me money to do that, nor should they, but that is exactly what is going on in private equity if you flip the argument around. Is the Blackstone IPO going to be a smart thing to buy? Well, I think it's going to be a smart thing for them to sell. It just underscores the irony of the private equity model which is most companies should be private, they are not efficiently run when they are public, there are too many prying shareholders, there's Sarbanes-Oxley, there's regulators, there's short sellers - take your pick - yet it's OK for them to go public at the management company level. And what is their motivation, do you think? I think most of us can probably guess what their motivation is. It's near the top of the market and valuations are rich for management companies and private equity. Richard Beales