Opening Bell: 5.23.16
World’s No. 2 Currency Trader Says Dollar Rebound Just the Start (Bloomberg)
A slump by the greenback earlier this year has “likely run its course,” analysts at Deutsche Bank wrote in a note Friday. The bank favors buying the U.S. currency versus emerging markets -- such as China, Mexico and South Korea -- following a shakeout in speculative bets on the dollar, George Saravelos, co-head of global foreign-exchange research in London, wrote.
Creditors of Puerto Rico government bank revive lawsuit over debt moratorium (Reuters)
Hedge funds who own debt at Puerto Rico's Government Development Bank are accusing the bank and the island's governor of giving preferential treatment to local creditors under a law designed to restructure GDB's debt, signaling a breakdown in a tentative restructuring deal the sides reached earlier this month. A bondholder group that includes hedge funds Brigade, Claren Road and Fir Tree updated an existing lawsuit against the bank and Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla late Friday, saying new amendments to a fiscal emergency law passed in April would protect local creditors over non-resident bondholders. The amendments went into effect on May 5.
A Venture Fund With Plenty of Virtual Capital, but No Capitalist (Dealbook)
Olivier Stern, a 31-year-old French socialist with an appetite for risk, recently invested a third of his life savings — 10,000 euros, about $11,000 — in a cryptocurrency start-up that has no legal standing and runs head-on into regulatory obstacles, yet might very well upend the mysterious world of virtual investing. The start-up, a sort of venture capital fund that calls itself the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, has essentially come out of nowhere in the last month and attracted about $152 million, at last count, from investors around the world like Mr. Stern — making it the most successful crowdfunded venture ever, by a significant margin. The venture, like so many things related to the digital currencies that cryptographers are creating on the Internet, is difficult to describe, and it may not be legal. But thousands of mostly anonymous investors have already heard about it through word of mouth and sent money — in the form of Ether, a freshly coded form of currency that has held itself out as a new and improved version of Bitcoin, the most popular virtual scrip.
LendingClub taps Jefferies to seek loan funding: sources (Reuters)
LendingClub Corp (LC.N) has hired investment bank Jefferies LLC to help it find investors for loan funding, people familiar with the matter said on Friday, as the U.S. online lender seeks to replenish investments after a probe over the sale of some of its loans. A number of LendingClub's largest investors have halted purchases of its loans, the company said in a quarterly filing this week, after an internal company probe found it had falsified documentation when selling a $22 million package of loans to an investor, which sources have said is Jefferies.
Billionaire throws tantrum after being denied entry to ‘Hamilton’ (NYP)
California tech billionaire and frequent “Shark Tank” guest Chris Sacca showed up at the Richard Rodgers Theatre last Thursday with two tickets he bought on StubHub. But when a scanner determined the tickets were counterfeit, and he and wife Crystal English were turned away, Sacca began flapping his jaws. “Do you know who I am?” Sacca thundered repeatedly, according to an eyewitness, a Broadway theater worker who requested anonymity. “He was getting really angry at the ticket scanner,” the tipster said, and speaking in “a really condescending way. “He said he was a ‘shark’ on ‘Shark Tank’ and warned it wouldn’t be good if they couldn’t get in.” Unable to calm Sacca, the ticket taker went to get the manager...But Sacca “wouldn’t take no for an answer,” the witness said. “He kept making a scene, saying how they had flown from California and it was his birthday.” After nearly 20 minutes of bickering, the couple left “in a huff.”
Tsipras Survives Austerity Vote, Opening Path for Loan Payment (Bloomberg)
Greek lawmakers on Sunday approved additional austerity measures required to unlock more emergency loans from the euro area, ahead of a meeting of finance ministers that will assess the country’s compliance with its bailout program and determine the scope for debt relief.
In the Clear, Phil Mickelson Can Thank an Insider Trading Ruling (NYT)
...given the set of facts laid out by the government, it’s a little hard to believe that he didn’t know what he was doing. The government won’t explicitly say the Newman case caused the government to back away from bringing charges against Mickelson. But at his news conference on Thursday, after declining to comment on that very question, Bharara did say this: “Conduct we think is nefarious, and undermines faith in the market and the fairness of the markets, will not be able to be prosecuted because of the Newman decision.”
Not all hedge funds are bringing in money (NYP)
Negative returns were reported by some of the biggest hedge fund industry movers and shakers in recent weeks. Dan Loeb’s Third Point Offshore Fund was down 2.3 percent in the quarter ended March 31. “The result of all of this was one of the most catastrophic periods of hedge fund performance that we can remember since the inception of this fund,” Loeb said in a quarterly letter. And as markets showed some gains by the end of April, there was more blood on the Street. Bridge Pure Alpha Strategy was negative 11 percent, and BlueCrest International was off 2.5 percent, to take two striking examples for the quarter.
Italian chefs break Guinness record with mile-long pizza (UPI)
A group of 100 Italian chefs in the city of Naples cooked up a 6,082-foot-long pizza to break a Guinness World Record. The chefs turned more than 44,000 pounds of flour, 3,500 pounds of tomatoes, 44,000 pounds of cheese and 53 gallons of olive oil to cook up the 1.15-mile-long Neapolitan pizza. The long pizza required 11 hours of cooking in five specially designed wood fire ovens.