Pause estivale

Nous ferons une pause estivale et serons de retour à la fin du mois d'août.

Fonds de couverture: le débat continue

Aujourd'hui, c'est au tour d'abord de Lynn Stout d'écrire un commentaire dans le Wall Street Journal sur les fonds de couverture. Intitulé Why Carl Icahn Is Bad for Investors [ici - abonnement requis], le commentaire de Stout insiste sur l'approche "court-termiste" de ces fonds:

Shareholder activism can raise the stock price of a particular company, to benefit particular shareholders, in the short run. But it lowers the value of the stock market as a whole, for average investors, in the long run.

This is because the shareholder activists that corporate boards fear most today are hedge funds like Mr. Icahn's: unregulated pools of wealthy investors who take large positions in a few select companies, use their ownership position to pressure boards into strategies they claim unlock "shareholder value," and then dump their stock as soon as the price rises.

[...]

Hedge funds want to make money, quick. They push for strategies that raise the stock price of the few companies they own but may lower the stocks of other companies, or that raise prices in the short term while harming companies' long-term prospects.

Larry Ribstein lui répond ici avec un commentaire dont l'essentiel est ceci:

Bottom line: there’s little support for Stout’s conclusion “that increasing shareholder activism may be a cure that is worse than the disease, at least for the average investor.”

Pour l'instant, si les positions théoriques sont bien campées, difficile de trancher ce débat empiriquement à mon avis.

Fonds de couverture: une nouvelle forme d'activisme?

C'est la question que nous pouvons nous poser en lisant l'article Corporate Veterans Anchor Activist-Hedge-Fund Slates du Wall Street Journal d'aujourd'hui (ici - abonnement requis). En effet, on y relate une certaine tendance des fonds à avoir recours à des consultants expérimentés en direction d'entreprise pour les appuyer dans leurs interventions:

Some hedge funds are more focused on the nitty-gritty of company operations than others. Jana Partners LLC, a $7 billion hedge-fund firm with gains of nearly 20% a year on average for the past six years, is pushing further into so-called operational activism by aligning itself with some veteran corporate executives.

Jana, based in New York, has recruited as an independent adviser Jerome York, 70 years old, who was chief financial officer for Chrysler and International Business Machines Corp. before counseling Kirk Kerkorian on his General Motors investment. Jana also has lured as an adviser John Kanas, 61, the banking executive who ran North Fork Bancorp for about three decades until overseeing its sale to Capital One Financial in 2006.

Cette approche vise à générer de la valeur par des méthodes qui s'apparentent davantage à celles des fonds de capitaux propres (private equity funds) qui prennent la direction des entreprises privatisées. Elle permet de faire échec à l'argument des dirigeants selon lesquels les fonds de couverture ont une perspective à court terme. En s'immiscant ainsi dans la gestion, les fonds pourraient toutefois prêter flan à la critique d'autres investisseurs, les attaquant en les assimilant aux dirigeants. Intéressants changement de perspective...

Comment réglementer les marchés financiers: suite

Le débat sur l'évolution de la réglementation des marchés aux États-Unis se poursuit avec l'article Unravelling Reagan - Amid Turmoil, the US Turns away from decades of deregulation dans le Wall Street Journal (ici - abonnement requis). Un passage très intéressant nous rappelle que le mouvement de va et vient entre réglementation et déréglementation est une caractéristique quasi-inhérente de la politique américaine:

The struggle between markets and the government is as old as the country itself. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton pushed for higher tariffs to protect nascent U.S. manufacturers, saying he wanted to preserve "a monopoly of the domestic market." That directly clashed with the get-the-government-off-our-back agrarianism of Thomas Jefferson.

Since then, various crises have sent the pendulum swinging back and forth. The handling of the financial panic of 1907 -- when a private individual, banker J.P. Morgan, bailed out a floundering U.S. economy -- stirred so much political outrage on the left that in 1913 the government created the Federal Reserve to run the financial system. The Depression-era collapse of markets led to the birth of a slew of new agencies, including the
Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which regulated and remade American-style capitalism.

Disgust at bungling government policies that by 1980 produced a combined rate of inflation and unemployment of 20% -- the "misery index" -- led to the election of Ronald Reagan. He rolled back regulation and antitrust enforcement as a way to free market forces from the shackles of government.

The movement started by President Reagan has taken several hits. The 2001 terror attacks led to the nationalization of airport
workers and the creation of the elephantine Homeland Security Agency, bucking decades of privatization of government functions. The corporate-accounting scandals early this decade that leveled energy trader Enron and communications giant WorldCom led to the Sarbanes-Oxley law in 2002, which reversed the pattern of the prior two decades of easing regulation of U.S. companies. Among that law's many provisions, chief executives had to accept legal responsibility for the accuracy of their firms' financial statements.