PDF Download Confidence Game: How Hedge Fund Manager Bill Ackman Called Wall Street's Bluff, by Christine S. Richard

PDF Download Confidence Game: How Hedge Fund Manager Bill Ackman Called Wall Street's Bluff, by Christine S. Richard

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Confidence Game: How Hedge Fund Manager Bill Ackman Called Wall Street's Bluff, by Christine S. Richard

PDF Download Confidence Game: How Hedge Fund Manager Bill Ackman Called Wall Street's Bluff, by Christine S. Richard

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Review

"This a riveting account of a tenacious investor, incompetent/apathetic regulators & analysts and a company that hid information, deceived investors and used every connection it had in its attempts to silence him. At points this reads like a John Grisham novel … except it actually happened. For me, this is the best of the ‘melt down’ books to date … hands down." — Todd Sullivan, valueplays.net, April 2010 " ... Ackman’s pursuit of MBIA spanned the two major crises of capitalism of the last decade, from the earlier era of corporate fraud prosecutions epitomized by Enron and its off-balance-sheet special purpose vehicles (SPVs), to the late credit debacle stemming from the collapse of the CDO house of cards." —The Hedge Fund Law Report, May 2010

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From the Inside Flap

The Warning and the Winnings Confidence Game is a real-world "Emperor's New Clothes," a tale of widespread delusion and one dissenting voice in the era leading up to the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression. Wall Street appeared to have found the secret for turning everything from risky mortgages to credit card bills into super-safe, triple-A-rated securities. Behind the facade of safety, the financial system had become dangerously fragile. Few had anything to gain from pointing out the risk. Bill Ackman did. In 2002, the hedge fund manager issued a critical research report on MBIA Inc., the owner of a triple-A-rated bond insurer that played a central role in the financial alchemy on Wall Street. "This company will spiral downward," Ackman warned, and he placed a bet against MBIA that would earn his investors billions of dollars if it did. The backlash was swift. Ackman was branded a fraud in the press and investigated by Eliot Spitzer and the SEC. Despite the scrutiny, he spent years telling anyone who would listen why MBIA was a catastrophe waiting to happen. With the onset of the credit crisis, the problems exposed turned out to be bigger than MBIA. An unquestioning acceptance of credit ratings, a blind eye to leverage, a dangerous reliance on financial models, and the abandonment of common sense had become part of a deeply flawed financial system. The collapse humbled nearly every large financial institution and plunged the country into recession. Ackman's story captures an era of delusional confidence, when debt exploded yet risk appeared to vanish. Told by award-winning bond market reporter Christine Richard, Confidence Game is a behind-the-scenes look at how warnings went unheeded as Wall Street careened toward disaster.

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Product details

Hardcover: 352 pages

Publisher: Bloomberg Press; 1 edition (April 26, 2010)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0470648279

ISBN-13: 978-0470648278

Product Dimensions:

6.3 x 1.1 x 9.3 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.4 out of 5 stars

57 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#207,966 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

I bought this book along with David Einhorn's ( Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, A Long Short (and Now Complete) Story, Updated with New Epilogue ) which is very similar in the storyline and end result.I thought this book was presented much better and I found myself more immersed in it than with Einhorn's. I was fighting to get through Einhorn's book, while I found myself wanting to read more of this one.All that being said, what Ackman did was tremendous - truly a David vs. Goliath task. However, as much respect as I have for Ackman and what he did and accomplished - as I read the book, I found myself questioning "Did Ackman simply uncover what was going on and made money being right"? or "Did Ackman actually cause the series of events to take place which caused the collapse of MBIA and other insurers after years of pitching his story"? It's sort of the same kind of thing that Dick Fuld brings up when discussing Lehman and Hank Greenberg discussing AIG...would the events which took place and the ultimate demise have happened on their own had short sellers and some of the nefarious actors not done what they did? Or would business have just continued as it always had? Though each of the companies did have problems, I'm not so sure that they would not have been able to muddle through...I believe it was with the added pressure applied by folks like Ackman and Einhorn that undermined public confidence in these companies that ultimately threw them into turmoil. Of course the financial crisis threw gasoline into the fire, but again, had public confidence not been undermined, perhaps they would have been able to raise additional money, righted their ships, and continued? The fact that MBIA is still in business today makes you really ask these questions. How could MBIA still be in business if what they were offering provided no benefit to the purchasers of municipal bond insurance and was simply added cost to taxpayers? Is there business really so different today?Today, MBIA does $1B in revenues while carrying $9B in debt - however, they are posting decent/strong earnings - $1.81/share over trailing 12 months with a stock price at $6.00. Ackman called for MBIA to go to bankruptcy, and it still has not happened...even after everything which has taken place.

This book came out in late April, and the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Financial Times have all ignored it.The lack of attention is a shame, because it's an amazing, amazing book.Hedge fund manager William Ackman gave author Christine Richard impressive access. She writes, "Ackman gave me a CD-ROM containing every e-mail he had written or received that mentioned MBIA as well as years of appointment calendars and access to an office filled with more than 40 boxes of documents he'd collected in researching MBIA. He encouraged colleagues, advisers, and friends to talk with me and spent hours answering my questions."The result is a fast-paced, behind-the-scenes look at how a "short" investor uses the press, stock analysts, and the government to beat down the price of a stock he has bet against.Mr. Ackman's campaign that is at the heart of this book is his war against Municipal Bond Insurance Association, or MBIA.Here the key journalist seems not to have been anyone at the New York Times, or even Ms. Richard, who worked for Dow Jones and Bloomberg. No, it was "Marty Peretz, the editor-in-chief of the New Republic magazine, who had been Ackman's thesis adviser when he was an undergraduate at Harvard."Mr. Peretz, reports Ms. Richard became the first investor in Mr. Ackman's hedge fund after Mr. Ackman "drove from Boston to Peretz's summer house on Cape Cod to pitch him the idea." (Mr. Peretz tells me the investment was $500,000, made at the time and not subsequently increased.)By Ms. Richard's account, Mr. Peretz wasn't exactly what you'd call a passive investor. After the SEC didn't really follow up on a meeting in which Mr. Ackman aired his allegations about MBIA to SEC staff, Mr. Peretz wrote in July 2004 to the chairman of the SEC, William Donaldson, "with whom he was friendly." Reports Ms. Richard, "Peretz's appeal stirred a response at the SEC, which asked Ackman to return to Washington."If the SEC did not act against MBIA, Mr. Ackman would try another regulator, the attorney general of New York, Eliot Spitzer. Ms. Richard reports that in January or February 2005: "Ackman, along with Marty Peretz, and Eliot Spitzer were huddled around a small table in the attorney general's office, eating pressed turkey sandwiches. Peretz had arranged the lunch meeting. Ackman wanted to point Spitzer toward the important issues at MBIA."If Mr. Spitzer and the SEC both did not act, there was always the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank. The book recounts Mr. Ackman and his lawyer flying to Boston on June 5, 2007 for a meeting with Congressman Frank, with whom they visited only after they "picked up Marty Peretz, who knew Frank from their student days at Harvard." Mr. Frank agreed to hold hearings on MBIA.There's plenty of other rich detail here. The broker who gave Mr. Ackman the idea to short MBIA worked for, of all places, Lehman Brothers.The dependent relationships among short-sellers, regulators, and the press are illuminated for all to see. At one point, Mr. Ackman asks an SEC official what it would take to get the agency to act. The SEC official's reply? "A story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, especially the New York Times."What to make of the whole episode? Well, it's certainly a newsworthy tale, and not only for those interested in hedge funds or short-selling. One MBIA vehicle named something like Latin for "black hole," Ms. Richard reports, "owned liens on 11,000 properties in Pittsburgh, nearly 10 percent of the entire city."As an investment idea, shorting MBIA was a big success. The shares lost more than 80% of their value. "Pershing Square investors made about $1.1 billion," Ms. Richard reports. About $140 million of that was Mr. Ackman's personally, though, Ms. Richard reports, he has pledged the entire amount to charity.Those troubled by Mr. Ackman's use of the regulators to press his position at least have to concede that MBIA and its allies also used the regulators to press their own case against Mr. Ackman, subjecting him to SEC and New York attorney general inquiries that were eventually dropped.While Ms. Richard's book is finished, the story isn't over. Some value investors are now placing bets on an MBIA recovery. And short-sellers are circling the for-profit education industry using the same strategy of press and regulatory pressure that was deployed so successfully against both Farmer Mac and MBIA.

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