Brief: Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman told CNBC on Monday the U.S. government should offer financial assistance to companies struggling with the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic. “If the government lets all these companies go bankrupt and they do disgorge labor, the government is going to have to basically pay a lot of unemployment benefits,” Cooperman said on “Fast Money Halftime Report.” “Instead, they make low-interest rate or interest-free loans to these companies that are experiencing [a] liquidity crisis, the companies fix themselves up and they come back.”
Brief: British investment manager Polar Capital has revealed that its assets under management (AuM) dropped 12% on a year-on-year basis to £12.2bn at the end of March 2020.The firm attributed the fall to the impact of the pandemic and a sharp fall in the oil price, which led to a fall in global equity markets. The AuM dipped by £1.9bn in the three months ended 31 March 2020. The firm’s AuM as of 31 March 2019 was £13.8bn.
Brief: SoftBank Group Corp. forecast a 1.35 trillion yen ($12.5 billion) operating loss for the fiscal year ended in March, a sign of how badly Masayoshi Son’s bets on technology startups have been battered in recent months. The Japanese company expects to record a 1.8 trillion yen loss from its Vision Fund and another 800 billion yen in losses from SoftBank’s own investments. It has written down the value of investments in companies, including office-rental startup WeWork and satellite operator OneWeb, which filed for bankruptcy last month. Son’s conglomerate has taken one blow after another since the implosion of WeWork’s initial public offering last year and SoftBank’s subsequent bailout. It bet heavily on sharing-economy startups, which allow people to split the use of offices or cars, but those investments have been particularly hard hit as the coronavirus pandemic curbs unnecessary human interaction.
Brief: Organized as a Maryland corporation, AEW Core Property Trust (U.S.) is an open-ended U.S. core real estate vehicle managed by Boston-based AEW Capital. Like other real estate funds, the trust is concerned about liquidity during the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. At December 31, 2019, the open-ended fund had US$ 9.5 billion of gross property value and net asset value equating to US$ 7.2 billion. AEW Capital informed investors that its suspending fund redemption requests. The fund is concerned about a rapid withdrawal, causing the portfolio’s value to drop sharply.
Brief: EJF Capital LLC, the multibillion-dollar credit-focused investment firm, is asking clients for a loan to avoid additional losses in one of its private funds, according to a recent company letter seen by Reuters. Sent to investors in the $206 million EJF Trust Preferred Fund LP, the letter said recent coronavirus-driven turbulence in short-term funding markets made continuing to use such debt a challenge, risking deeper fund losses if positions had to be liquidated to pay it back.
Brief: Billionaire investor Cliff Asness has spent his quarantine watching $43 billion disappear. Asness’ AQR Capital — which managed $186 billion at the end of 2019 — has updated its Web site to reflect that its assets under management as of March 31 now stand at $143 billion. It’s unclear how much of the massive 23 percent drop in assets is due to investor withdrawals versus investment losses, but the notoriously outspoken Asness, 53,has been sufferingfrom redemptions amid sagging performance since last year. Returns have worsened this year for some of Asness’ funds as the coronavirus pandemicbatters the economyand the stock market, according to AQR’s Web site.