12 Apr NEWS GIVES HEDGE FUND THE EDGE; DIMON’S BAD NEWS
NEWS GIVES HEDGE FUND THE EDGE
A journalist and hedge fund manager walk into a bar and start talking, sounds like the start of a bad joke, and in some respects it is.
A US-based fund – Hunterbrook Capital – has raised $150 million to make trades based on content produced by its internal newsroom of investigative reporters – Hunterbrook Media.
Hiring a top SEC silk to oversee its operations, the firm said it would only make trades on publicly available information and publish articles on which it has no financial positions.
Industry experts have mixed opinions on the viability of the product, but everyone agrees the move is yet another disruption to the heavily fragmented media landscape.
DIMON’S BAD NEWS
It’s not good news when the CEO of the world’s largest bank is worried about the state of the economy and provides a concerning forecast.
In JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s 27,000-word shareholder letter, published Monday night, he states that the US economy remains on the brink of a downturn.
According to Dimon, the country’s biggest threat is inflation. He said that increased government spending, global trading shocks, increased military conflict, and a rise in loans required for large climate projects are making it more difficult than expected to curb inflation.
Dimon predicts interest rates could soar as high as 8 per cent to respond to stubbornly high prices despite the Federal Reserve forecasting rate cuts. This is a concern for Australia and the rest of the world, with most central banks following the Fed’s interest rate structure or else possibly risk significant capital outflows and currency depreciation.
WATCHDOG TIGHTENS LEASH ON M&A
New laws proposed by the federal government will give the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) more power to prevent harmful mergers and acquisitions.
Instead of the ACCC investigating deals only after they are publicly disclosed, companies will be required to notify and attain approval from the watchdog before completing the transaction, or else it will be void.
The new laws will also allow the ACCC to consider a company’s purchases over the last three years and prevent repeated, creeping acquisitions that would contribute to market power accumulation.
According to Treasurer Jim Chalmers, these reforms aim to align Australia’s M&A laws with global standards, enhance transparency, and “bring our merger settings into the 21st century”.
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