Financial Mines

I can’t believe the flap over the arrest of Professor Gates will be discussed today over foreign beer at the White House. According to reports, Bud Light, Blue Moon and Red Stripe are on tap, and all are made by companies domiciled outside of the U.S.

This occasion calls for American beer, perhaps some from the John Harvard’s chain of brewpubs which got its start where the incident took place, in Cambridge, Mass. there’s also Harpoon and Sam Adams from Boston, or as mentioned in today’s WSJ, Capital City in DC has been lobbying for a place at the table for its aptly named Equality Ale.

Think globally, drink locally, gentlemen.

This from FinAlternatives: A Man Group fund of hedge funds is making a big bet on a new sovereign-debt hedge fund founded by three Brevan Howard Capital Management veterans.

RMF Global Emerging Managers has invested $50 million in Greenwich, Conn.-based 5:15 Capital Management, currently best known for being name for a song by The Who. As part of the deal, Man will get a share of the new firm’s revenue.

5:15 launched its first hedge fund earlier this month with $60 million. The fund has a $1 billion capacity.

There might be some Who fans at the Man Group, too, I guess. Happy Jack, after all, lived in the sand at the Isle of Man, right?

Looks like GE had an end-run planned around ILFC, the AIG unit and leases airplanes and the direct rival of Stamford-based GE Commercial Aviation Services.

According to the wires, GE offered $2 billion to CIT over the weekend as it was struggling to find capital after Washington said no bailout for you. GE offered good terms, but the collateral was the aircraft CIT leases out.

Now some days, GECAS is the biggest aircraft lessor in the world, and some days it seems to be ILFC. If GE somehow ended up with CIT’s planes, Mr. Udvar-Hazy and his ILFC crew in Los Angeles would have been the also-rans for some time to come. GE certainly knows how to leverage its businesses, and would have made a good buck not only for GECAS, but for Aircraft Engines out in Evandale, Ohio, too.

ILFC is already in parent company limbo as Steve seeks the money to wrest it out of troubled AIG’s grasp, so it’s been a little distracted of late. Add that to the airline slump and Henry Hubschman and GECAS would have had a big leg up on the competition.

STAMFORD, Conn. – (AP) A former Greenwich man has been sentenced to three years in prison for an investment scam.

Forty-seven-year-old Bradley Kabbash has also been ordered to pay more than $800,000 restitution for a scheme involving bogus investments in hospital and surgical centers.

Kabbash had pleaded guilty in January to the charges. He was sentenced Tuesday in Stamford Superior Court.

Kabbash was arrested by the Office of the Chief State’s Attorney following an investigation into a complaint alleging fraud by his Darien company, HCH Cypress.

So it’s 7:45 on Friday, July 17, and CIT is still around and looking for financing to stave off a bankruptcy, or maybe for DIP financing if it has to file.  It can’t be pleasant knowing there is no Washington rescue, especially when all the investment banks are reporting strong profits based on their government bailouts.  I’ll bet Bill Koslo, managing director of CIT Capital Markets, doesn’t make it home to Darien this weekend, but I wish him success at whatever CIT is planning to do for its business, its clients and its employees.

It’s hard to imagine what it’s like at 7 p.m. July 16 for the people at CIT. I’m sitting in the newsroom refreshing my wires to see if they’ve slipped stealthily into bankruptcy court, or if Treasury is arranging a sale to somebody with a little more strength. GE Capital? My other thought was Heller, but then I remembered that GE gobbled them up 8 years ago.

Letting somebody take over the CIT business with the right guarantees would likely be preferable to just letting everbody sort it out in bankruptcy court, especially for small businesses worried that their loans could be called.

Sure it’s OK to play hardball, and it’s good for some businesses to fail. Hey, this is capitalism … or it was until last September. But the mortgage mod program is presently molesting the canine and I don’t think we want to abandon small business people the way we’re hanging homeowners out to dry.

Just whom did President Obama mean when he said Friday at the conclusion of the G8 summit in Italy that “Reckless actions by a few have fueled a recession that spans the globe?”

I’ve got a feeling that among them are the folks up at 50 Danbury Road in Wilton at AIG Financial Products.

Yes, AIGFP bet $2 trillion that it didn’t have on derivatives and got caught with its pants down. But as a story running Sunday in the Advocate, Greenwich Time, Connecticut Post and Danbury News-Times makes clear, a lot of AIGFP’s bets have paid off, and many people at the unit recognized looming economic dangers and tried to push the company in another direction. They were overruled by the big boss of the unit.

That the mistakes of a single company can be so huge the world economy is threatened seems impossible, but it’s not the first time it’s happened. A dozen years ago, Long-Term Capital Management of Greenwich nearly crashed the global economic system by making bad bets on Russian bonds, which went into default. Leveraged beyond reason, LTCM needed a rescue that from today’s perspective seems minor. But LTCM, too, threatened to bring down the house.

Having back-to-back world economic near-disasters get their start in lower Fairfield County is a troubling coincidence, and the new financial regulations being promoted by Obama, his economic team and the other G8 leaders are aimed at nowhere more than right here.

Well, Delta had it wrong on my itinerary, but the airline was consistent in telling me I’d be flying on 737-200, even though it had retired those old rustbuckets years ago.

Even when I checked in online on Sunday, the Web page said to expect the old Boeing.

But instead, a mint-fresh 737-700 pulled up to the gate in Atlanta, and this was a nice new plane. It had a touch-screen video system at each seat, which not only reclined but the bottom cushion slid forward for more comfort. Blended winglets and high-bypass turbofans heralded the external differences between the promised -200 and the delivered -700, and there are many more upgrades not so visible.

While I was looking forward to flying on a bit of history, I didn’t mind the more modern ride at all.