IF YOU ARE one of those people who doesn’t mind worrying, really worrying, think of the High Grade Structured Leveraged Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund. The hedge fund, run by Bear Stearns, is struggling to raise cash so that it can avoid passing into the dustbin of history. Like another Bear Stearns fund that holds similar assets but is not so heavily leveraged, the fund’s assets consist in good part of bonds backed by sub-prime mortgages, loans made to borrowers whose histories or incomes make them less-than-good risks. Rising default and late-payment rates have called the value of these mortgages into question, prompting the banks that lent the fund $6 billion to demand repayment of their loans. Since the fund has only $600 million in investors’ capital, Bear Stearns has no way of repaying its creditors, and at this writing is scrambling to obtain new loans and new equity capital. In short, the fund finds itself in a position not very different from that of tiny sub-prime borrowers, only on a larger scale.
This might merely be a matter of no concern to policymakers: bad luck for well-informed and well-heeled investors and lenders such as Barclays PLC, Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup who underestimated the risk involved in investing in this fund. But there might be collateral damage which affects innocent bystanders. If the assets that underlie the fund, now being auctioned off, bring only knock-down prices, similar assets now valued in the trillions, might also be revalued sharply downward. That would hit the earnings of several big banks, reducing their willingness and ability to lend, possibly contributing to the slowing effect on the economy of falling home sales. If very early reports that some of the items in the portfolio are selling for ten-cents-on-the-dollar prove to be true, some banks, endowment funds, and others will have a lot of explaining to do. To calm markets and preserve its reputation in the bond market, in which it is a major player, late last week Bear Stearns bailed out the sister fund by agreeing to lend it up to $3.2 billion. But the highly leveraged fund remains, as the jargon goes, “troubled.”
