Thursday, May 07, 2009

Cliff Asness, on Obama's Chrysler's reorganization

Cliff Asness is a hedge fund manager. You may know that the Obama administration criticized Hedge fund managers for not going along with his plan for reorganizing Chrysler.
As one of the targets of the Obama administration, he obviously has a stake in all of this.
Cliff gave his argument on "Zero Hedge". I'm including a large portion of it, because he makes a great point:
Here's a shock. When hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds, and individuals, including very sweet grandmothers, lend their money they expect to get it back. However, they know, or should know, they take the risk of not being paid back. But if such a bad event happens it usually does not result in a complete loss. A firm in bankruptcy still has assets. It’s not always a pretty process. Bankruptcy court is about figuring out how to most fairly divvy up the remaining assets based on who is owed what and whose contracts come first. The process already has built-in partial protections for employees and pensions, and can set lenders' contracts aside in order to help the company survive, all of which are the rules of the game lenders know before they lend. But, without this recovery process nobody would lend to risky borrowers. Essentially, lenders accept less than shareholders (means bonds return less than stocks) in good times only because they get more than shareholders in bad times.

The above is how it works in America, or how it’s supposed to work. The President and his team sought to avoid having Chrysler go through this process, proposing their own plan for re-organizing the company and partially paying off Chrysler’s creditors. Some bond holders thought this plan unfair. Specifically, they thought it unfairly favored the United Auto Workers, and unfairly paid bondholders less than they would get in bankruptcy court. So, they said no to the plan and decided, as is their right, to take their chances in the bankruptcy process. But, as his quotes above show, the President thought they were being unpatriotic or worse.

That's all true. The president favored the United Auto Workers above the people who invested in the company. That's not fair. The company would not be there if it wasn't for investors.

No comments: