Credit crunch: shadows who move markets

Who are these enigmatic hedge fund managers now under the spotlight? Ross Clark introduces the top players

Financial crisis: A survival guide
On modern housing estates, it is safe to assume that the more agreeably pastoral the street name, the more brash and unpleasant the street. So it is with hedge funds.

Their name conjures up images of suburban respectability, of neatly trimmed gardens in Beckenham inhabited by soberly dressed bank clerks. The reality, of course, is a world of sharp deals and calculating plays on the share prices of underperforming companies.

But who are they, these hedge fund managers who have reputedly been making fortunes from economic misery while the rest of us have seen our share portfolios shrink?

Unlike the yuppies of the 1980s, "hedgies" - or "the new masters of the universe", as Tom Wolfe dubbed them - have crept up on the financial world virtually unnoticed - at least until Wednesday's raid on HBOS.

True, one hedge fund manager, Arpad Busson, chairman and founder of EIM, which is a fund of hedge funds, is dating Uma Thurman, but it hasn't exactly made him a household name.

But there is none of the swagger of the Flaming Ferraris, the vulgar band of traders at Credit Suisse First Boston who famously posed as the Reservoir Dogs for photographers as they entered a London restaurant and one of whose number, Lord Archer's son James, was banned from working in the City for life after being caught trying to manipulate the Swedish stock market.

If a hedgie owns a fast car he can't necessarily be bothered to drive it. One of the few to have obtained a public profile was Bertrand des Pallières, head of the hedge fund SPQR - less a Flaming Ferrari than a Mouldering Maserati.

Last year he baffled officers at a car pound by failing to pick up his £80,000 Maserati Cambiocorsa after it was towed away for his failure to pay 65 congestion charges. When he did eventually collect the vehicle shortly before it was to be auctioned, he said: "I drive it in summer and this summer I am too busy."

Few outsiders could name a single hedge fund, let alone explain what they do - which is, in short, form independent companies, invest the money of the super-rich and, through an alchemical process that involves calculated risk, create more money.

Unbound by the structures of banks, where a fund manager cannot take risks for fear of upsetting clients, hedgies are free to use unconventional money?making techniques, such as betting (or hedging) that a share price is going to fall. Typically, a hedgie picks up 20 per cent of the profit he makes for a client.

Robin Griffiths, who runs a £40 million hedge fund called the Worldwide Absolute Return Fund for Cazenove Capital Management, explains: "The tolerance for losing money in the hedge fund world is very small.

The clients say, 'Look, I didn't ask you to beat an index, I didn't ask you to shoot the lights out. All I asked was to make me money.' That's the main difference between hedge funds and the rest of the banking industry."

So, back to the quiz. Anyone heard of TCI, Centaurus, Toscafund? Thought not. And yet the wealth of the top hedge fund managers dwarfs that of the top brass at many City firms. Michael Hintze, the chairman of CQS Partners, has an estimated £275 million, putting him on a par with your average chief executive of a City bank.

Noam Gottesman, founder of GLG, is reputed to have earned £225 million in 2006. Louis Bacon of Moore Capital is thought to be worth £1 billion.

Anonymity has brought its rewards. Few, until this week, have been aware of the more dubious practices employed by hedge funds to generate large profits even when the markets are on a downer.

Yet there is nothing new about what happened to HBOS on Wednesday. Everyone has heard of Nick Leeson, and many recall that James Archer was sacked from his City job. But how many people know the name Philippe Jabre?

He has the distinction of earning the biggest fine handed down by the FSA - £750 thousand - after he was found guilty of "market abuse" while taking a punt on the share prices of Japanese banks.

Whispered rumours have long been a feature of the dubious hedge fund operators and were responsible for sharp falls in the share prices of Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland last autumn.

Insiders speak of "men in dark glasses" with mobile phones who will deliberately spread news of an emergency loan or some other piece of news calculated to drive a share price down.

But if hedgies have a reputation as clever, manipulative and slightly shady traders, they haven't managed to impress all insiders. This week's raid on HBOS is not so much a sign of intelligence as a sign of an industry in dire straits, says Tim Price of the wealth management group PFP.

"There is more confidence, more of a swagger to hedge fund managers than to other City workers," he says. "But it isn't a case of them having more intelligence. In the words of Warren Buffett, the tide has gone out and an awful lot of them have been caught swimming with no clothes on.

"It is an open secret that a lot of the leveraged funds will collapse or wind themselves up over the next six months. It is a bit like 1999 when a lot of City people left to set up dot-coms and were then left trying to work themselves back into their old jobs."

Hedge funds may represent new money but they are on the traditional side when it comes to their tastes. Not for them the glass towers of the City: they tend to be based in the West End and are responsible for a recent surge in rents in St James's.

Hedgies are not ones to buy glass penthouses, says Ed Mead of the estate agent Douglas and Gordon: they quietly buy houses in traditional parts of Chelsea or Kensington.

In June 2006, the hedge fund industry hired Knebworth, the stately home outside Stevenage, and staged a rock festival dubbed "Hedgestock". There, they quaffed champagne, took parachute jumps and listened to the Who.

They even persuaded Roger Daltrey et al to play for free, on the understanding that hedgies would donate generously to Daltrey's chosen charity, the Teenage Cancer Trust.

One purpose of Hedgestock was to portray the hedge fund industry as socially responsible. Their growth was partly a response to regulation in banking - they are a vehicle for keeping secrets that public companies would have to divulge.

According to Hugh Adlington of Rathbone Brothers, fewer than one in 20 hedge funds would meet the basic requirements of due diligence and competence that are required of pension fund managers.

But then, the term "hedge fund" covers a multitude of different organisations, he says. There are 11,000 of them, though many are "two men and a dog" operations. It is among these, rather than the larger funds, that the culprits for this week's attack on HBOS are likely to be found.

Credit Card Skins - Credit Cards As A Fashion Statement

I have always viewed credit cards as a financial tool. So it came as a bit of surprise when I realized that for many people credit cards are just as much a fashion statement as they are a financial tool. This truly hit home this weekend.



I was talking with a lady who has 17 different credit cards. When I asked why she had so many different credit cards, she replied that she “got bored with the design” on them and so she needed to get new cards to get new designs.



Her words left me speechless, but they really shouldn’t have. All you have to do is look at how credit cards are marketed to realize that there are a huge number of people who choose their credit card for the fashion statement it makes and not the financial advantages (or disadvantages) it may have.



The more I thought about it, I realized that credit cards as a fashion statement even occurs in my own household. My wife applied for her credit card for the sole reason of obtaining a credit card with the animation character she wanted on it. The interest rate made littel difference to her. She wanted a card that looked a certain way and that is the one she applied for and received.



Since we pay off our credit cards in full each month, my wife getting her card as a fashion statement has little negative effect on us. For someone that has 17 different credit cards, however, it could make a huge imapact, especially if the interest rates vary by quite a bit and the person doesn’t pay off their cards in full each month.



While I certainly don’t believe that people should pick their credit cards for the fashion statement it makes, I also know that for some like my wife, no reasoning is going to convince them otherwise. That being said, there may be a better way to pimp your credit card than to apply for a new one each time you’re ready for a new design.



There is a company that will actually let you buy credit card skins which you can place on your credit card to give it a new look whenever you want. While my wife described their offering as “unimaginative and boring” when I showed her the site, I’m sure that you will see more companies offering credit card skins with a wider variety of designs in the future. If your credit card has to make a fashion statement, these seem like a much better alternative than to get a new credit card every time you get bored with the design.

EXTRA CREDIT

Thanks to an innovative program, engineering students get a look at state-of-the-art facilities.

the drilling rig stands tall amid the hills of western Oklahoma. There's serious business going on here: Skilled workers are tending the machinery, pulling up long pipes that are stacked neady at the base of the rig and threading them deftly into the ever-deepening shaft. The sound of the operation is deafening, mixing the whine of three electrical generators and the occasional squeal of metal rubbing against metal.

You can tell who does what by the color of the hardhat. The white hardhats work for Marathon Oil, which owns this site. The 30-some green hardhats are visitors-green means greenhorn-part of a delegation of students and professors from the University of Texas Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering. They are here as part of Camp Bevo,la weeklong program intended to give second-year students a feel for what it's really like to work in the oil business. For most of them, it's the first time they've been so close to an oil rig going full tilt.

The half-dozen men in the red hardhats work for Halliburton, the international oil services company. Halliburton is hosting the students, showing them various facilities around its hometown of Duncan, Okla. By the end of the week, the company will have led tours of its enormous manufacturing facility and its research and development labs. The students will have met dozens of Halliburton executives, some flown in from the company's corporate headquarters in Houston.

As the students crawl over the rig, watching the metal go into the hole and rock-laced mud being pumped out, it's easy to grasp what the university is getting out of the deal. The students are alive with questions, and aware of the power and potential that the rig represents. Such demonstrations are part of a concerted effort to retrain more students in the petroleum engineering department in order to meet a growing demand for engineers in the on industry.

Halliburton is getting something out of this, too, but not what one might think at first glance. Though it's a dominant player in the oil industry, Halliburton itself is more likely to hire mechanical engineers than any other type.

What Halliburton sees in the students it's hosting isn't potential employees, but future clients. Thanks to demographic pressures, in 10 years' time, these petroleum engineering students-the ones wearing the green hatswill be handed the keys to the oil industry.

Youth Movement

The petroleum industry is on the cusp of an incredible youth movement. Part of that is because of the steep run-up in oil prices in the past few years, which has created a demand for engineers who can tap into the increasingly hard-to-reach fields.

Unfortunately, during the late 1980s and 1990s, the industry was beset by a glut of skilled workers due to a collapse in the price of oil. "There was a huge round of mergers and consolidation that put people out of work," said Tim Taylor, who worked in the industry for more than three decades. "The people who were laid off didn't come back to the industry. As a result, the average age of petroleum engineers is over 50."

When Taylor retired in 2000, he returned to Austin, where he had earned his Ph.D. in petroleum engineering, to become a professor in the petroleum engineering department. The Texas program regularly ranks in the top two in the country, but when Taylor arrived, the department was having problems retaining students. As many as 40 percent of the freshmen class switched majors before the end of the sophomore year. "The students didn't know what they wanted to do," Taylor said. "We were losing them in that first year."

Across the country, petroleum engineering programs were feeling a similar pinch. From a peak of around 11,000 in the early 1980s, enrollments declined dramatically, bottoming out at just 1,300 in the late 1990s. And while that level was sufficient for the industry during the oil bust, oil companies have begun a new burst of exploration and production now that tight supplies have become a permanent fixture. Taylor and his colleagues at Texas realized that they had to increase the number of students in the department substantially if they were going to meet the demands of industry for new engineers.

The first step was a concerted recruitment program. "We've doubled enrollment," Taylor said, adding that the department was now at the saturation point in terms of students. But it wasn't enough just to recruit more bodies; they had to retain them. Part of the effort involved a substantial increase in financial aid for students in the program, with the money coming from companies in the form of sponsored scholarships.

But one of the dissatisfactions the engineering students had with the program, Taylor said, was that there wasn't enough hands-on activity. In a sense, that's understandable: Oil facilities are, by necessity, remote and hazardous workplaces, and hard to get to during a school year crammed with courses. And while that's part of the romance that draws people into the field, the potential liability makes companies reluctant to invite students for a look around.

It took some work, but Taylor was able to arrange for Shell to host a group of students at its offshore training facility in Louisiana during winter break and for Halliburton to host a contingent over two different weeks in the summer.

And thus Camp Bevo-named for the University of Texas longhorn mascot-was born.

Inside the Yellow Lines

One morning in late May, as the second day of a new session of Camp Bevo began, Taylor chewed out the assembled students, who were expected to be in attendance a full 15 minutes before the scheduled start time of 8 o'clock. Most of the students seemed too groggy to do more than absorb the lecture, elbows on tables, heads on hands. Then the group was bundled into vans and driven to the other end of Halliburton's 320-acre campus, where the company's large manufacturing plant was located.

Halliburton prides itself on manufacturing most of its own heavy machinery, and the Duncan plant is the core of that operation. As the students stood in the lobby of the plant, the leader of the tour, Gary Strong, a mechanical engineer who serves as senior technical professional in the manufacturing center, provided the ground rules. "Don't touch anything," Strong warned. "Don't touch anything."

Staying inside the yellow lines on the floor, the small groups wandered through acres of pumps and engines and trailers, all painted Halliburton red. "We build our equipment from the ground up," Strong said over the din of the factory floor. "We build 40,000 hydraulic horsepower a month in pumps."

Maybe it was too loud or maybe it was too noisy, but hardly anyone asked questions. A quality control engineer talking about Six Sigma practices had to use M&Ms to bribe responses from the tour group. One demonstration did get the students' attention-inertial welding, in which a pipe was spun up to some 3,000 revolutions per minute and then jammed into a fixture. As the pipe glowed red, Strong proudly reported that Halliburton had never had an inertial weld fail.

For many of the students, the factory was a new experience. Many of the petroleum engineering students come from families with ties to the energy industry in Houston or Dallas. The manufacturing center, on the other hand, was the domain of mechanical engineers. There were two to three times as many MEs as any other specialty, Strong estimated.

To student Malek Lemkecher, the manufacturing center tour was a glimpse into another world. Lemkecher had chosen petroleum engineering over computer engineering because he was drawn to the skill set the oil industry demands.

After the factory tour, the students returned to the training campus for lunch. To a person, the students marveled at the facilities. Once the afternoon sessions concluded, the students took up golf on the nine-hole course or played pickup basketball until late into the evening.

The lush facility is evidence of the role that training has at Halliburton. There's a constant need for developing new skills, said J.J.Jennings, who is in charge of training operations in the Western Hemisphere for Halliburton. "We've found that the half-fife for training is just five years," Jennings said. Consequently, Jennings oversees a continual stream of workers taking refresher courses or getting acquainted with new technology. Though he is now based in Houston, he is the former head of the Duncan facility and returned to the campus for Camp Bevo. He is something of a throwback, with his hair in a flattop, and was dressed in Halliburton red coveralls as he drove a vanload of students to the Apache drilling site.

Much like Taylor, Jennings sees the industry made of two distinct generations. "There's a big gap between the Baby Boomers and the engineers with 10 years' experience or less," he said. Difference isn't just in age, but also in temperament. While Baby Boomers "have a tendency to try to teach everything you have to know all at once," the younger generation is geared to learning in a just-in-time, just-as-you-need-it manner, he said. "If we don't understand how they process data," Jennings said, "we'll never get through to them."

Classrooms Are Too Small

To that end, Halliburton has invested in simulator training facilities and creating a space on the Internet for workers in the field to share best practices. The goal is to have a consistent level of quality through the organization. "One Halliburton" is the phrase that kept being repeated during the tours. But the generational difference is also one of the underlying factors in the establishment of Camp Bevo: The classroom is becoming too small, too linear to hold the attention of students today.

Though Texas's Taylor boasts that Halliburton hired four of his program's graduates last year, the company has relatively few petroleum engineers on its payroll. Jennings said the company generally hires mechanical engineers or other specialists. Jennings himself isn't an engineer at all and got his start at Halliburton sweeping floors during summer break from college.

So what, exactly, is in it for Halliburton to host 30some petroleum engineering students for a week?

"Dr. Taylor wants to broaden his students' horizon of the oil business," Jennings said. "They get a pretty good understanding of the producers' end, but they didn't have a feel for the service end. When he approached us, we realized petroleum engineers are our customers. We didn't look at this as a recruiting effort as much as it was an effort to introduce ourselves to our customers before they graduate from college."

Positive Impressions

Indeed, with the average petroleum engineer closing in on retirement age, the students in Camp Bevo are going to be decision makers very early in their careers. Forming a positive impression now could reap enormous benefits for Halliburton down the line. It's a strategy that consumer products companies have long known-early brand associations can be the most enduring.

"By the time they graduate, it's too late," Jennings continued. "And besides, we really enjoy putting this on, going out in the field with these youngsters and answering the questions they have."

Unlike the morning tour at the manufacturing center, when the students seemed disengaged, there was an air of excitement at the drilling rig that afternoon. The students were asking sharp questions, and leaned in close to hear the answers over the din of the generators. How much do the drilling bits cost? What's the diameter of the hole? Stacked around the towering rig is a million dollars of steel pipe, waiting to be pushed into the ground.

Maybe Halliburton's strategy of showing off what a top-flight services company can do will pay off in the next decade. But on the van ride back, it's too early to say just what these students will be doing then. Sitting in the back of the van, Edward Aviles, a sophomore from a suburb of Houston, ventures that he might want an office job. Ian Magin, also from outside Houston, thinks working in the field might be fun, but he's a recent transfer into the program and is still getting up to speed. The hard career choices-working for a major or an independent, abroad or stateside-are still years away.

The hot Oklahoma sun sinks toward the horizon. The students relax, but their minds are still active. Some spend the hour talking about Euler series and computer modeling, and which professors are the most engaging lecturers.

By Jeffrey Winters, Associate Editor

Copyright American Society of Mechanical Engineers Nov 2007
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

Tax credits

I generally agree with Dr. Wilbur Rich's well-detailed recipe ("St. Louis Blues," features, Winter 2008) for legislative failure regarding the 2005 and 2006 tax credit proposals in Missouri. Like any good connoisseur of school politics, Rich pays close attention to inputs and outcomes. In his article, race, partisanship, and cartel politics represent the major ingredients in this recipe. As Rich adopted "the blues" as a working metaphor to explain the defeat of tax credit bills in Missouri, I have chosen "soul food" as the metaphor for my response.

Soul food is only as good as the cook and the ingredients used in its preparation. Too many cooks in the kitchen contributed to the failure of the tax credit proposals. Republican Jane Cunningham and black state representatives Ted Hoskins and Rodney Hubbard, both Democrats, were the original cooks. Missouri Democrats watered down the tax credit bills with "killer amendments," while the state teachers union and the AFL-CIO added extra helpings of sour cream and vinegar. By the time this motley crew turned off the stove, the tax credit bill had lost its flavor and its soul.

Taste determines the authenticity of soul food. In the Missouri legislative battle, no matter how many times the sponsors called their bill a tax credit, opponents convinced diners that the bills smelled like, and had the consistency of, "school vouchers." Because of the opponents' successful this-bill-will-leave-a-bad-taste-in-your-mouth campaign, few people had the stomach to support it.

Parental choice supporters nationwide should study Rich's recipe before attempting to enact a school reform law. Since I was on the frontline of a similar legislative battle in 2006, I will offer two suggestions: First, cooks and ingredients needed for this battle are not found solely on the Hill; they also must be gathered in the 'hood. Second, soul food cannot exist without intense heat. It is needed to break down ingredients to create a jazzlike harmony of taste. Similarly, parental choice coalitions must bring together a proper blend of ingredients at the right temperature to achieve success in the legislative arena. These ingredients at minimum include an adult-size serving of money, a healthy dose of bipartisanship, and organic community ownership. To win a legislative battle for parental choice, bring the fire next time.

GERARD ROBINSON

President

Black Alliance for Educational Options

COPYRIGHT 2008 Hoover Institution Press
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

Your Money: CREDIT CRISIS

FEARS of a recession still won't go away and soon only borrowers with good credit histories will get top deals.

Even though interest rates were held at 5.25pc on Thursday, some lenders and credit card firms are UPPING their rates due to the global credit crunch.

Only last week a City financial watchdog warned that the days of cheap credit are well and truly over.

So if your credit history is a bit dodgy, you are going to find it harder to get a loan or mortgage. Every one of us has a credit rating based on how we've dealt with debts in the past.

If you have been late with payments or defaulted on a loan, you're seen as a high risk and lenders will refuse credit - or make you pay more interest.

But there are lots if things you can do to clean up your rating. First, you need to look at your credit report to find out if there are any problems.

Checking online is easiest. The Credit Expert service run by Experian is free for the first 30 days, then pounds 6.99 a month. It gives unlimited access to your credit report and alerts you by text or email if it changes. This is very useful in preventing identity fraud, as you will spot any new arrangements taken out in your name.

My Callcredit gives unlimited access to your credit report for three months with an pounds 8.95 quarterly subscription. Or you can get a one-off online report from www.equifax.co.uk for pounds 11.95. For pounds 2 all three agencies will post you a Statutory Credit Report.

To stop your rating getting any worse, set up direct debits for existing loans so you don't miss payments. To improve it, close any old credit card accounts, even those with a zero balance, as lenders take these into consideration when working out how much credit to give you.

James Jones, of Experian, said: "If you have moved recently, make sure you are on the electoral roll. Lenders are likely to refuse you credit if not.

"Also, if you have missed payments, you can add an explanatory note of up to 200 words to your credit report which lenders will look at."

Be aware if you're shopping around for credit that simply making multiple searches can affect your rating if you give your name each time. And check any joint arrangements with a friend or partner. If they have a particularly bad rating, it affects yours too. It might be wise to put any future deals in your name only.

Copyright 2008 MGN LTD
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.