"US Banking Sector: Lehman Q3 Net Falls Less Than Expected" Video Transcription
Host: Geoff Cutmore
Host: Let’s get to Hong Kong, Todd Everts, he’s the CEO of Wall Street Global.
Todd, you are looking very closely at what these banks are telling us at this point.
How confident can we feel that Lehman is on the mark both with its numbers at this
point and the message?
Todd G. Everts : Well, the message that they’re putting out is obviously
the one that they want to be on their favor based on their stock price. The issues
that face us going forward are the further fallout from the sub prime crisis. I
mean if we look at these borrowers, may of these borrowers, if we start at one end,
the borrowers maybe shouldn’t have a mortgage to begin with and we’re finding the
possibility of a lot of fraud and inflated values of these homes. On the other end
we have large investors that are using tremendous amounts of credit to purchase,
namely hedge funds, buying these mortgages and so we have in the middle the banks
and these banks are tightening their lines with the hedge funds and on the other
end we have people that just can’t pay their mortgages. So this is an event that
we’re going to continue to see fall out in the weeks to come.
Host: In terms of the..you know..what the banks have to tell us about the
earnings that they’ve been able to generate through the recent period, are we going
to start to see any big hit to trading income given the difficulty now with which
many professionals are having making money in this environment?
Todd G. Everts: You know Geoff, that’s a fantastic point. If we go back to,
let’s say the early 80s and the mid-80s the financial markets were really driven
by large pension plans, institutional investors, insurance companies. Through the
90s we saw the markets really dictated by mutual fund managers as the industry in
the US grew to 10 trillion dollars. Neither of those two investors in the 80s or
the 90s were using a lot of leverage. Today the markets are really being controlled
by hedge funds and these hedge funds can lever up 2,3,5,10 times. The other thing
that we have to remember is mutual fund managers – they can have a knee-jerk reaction:
if the investor is putting in a redemption as an example, that is seen in the market
within a matter of a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Hedge funds are using
a tremendous amount of leverage but their investors oftentimes need to put in a
60 or 90 day notice where they might have liquidity annually or quarterly. So when
we see negative-marked months like July and now August in the hedge fund world,
we’ll continue to see redemptions but those redemptions won’t play into the market
until some time around the 1st of the year, and that can hit the bottom line of
the trading profits from these big banks.
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