Hedge Funds Mystify Markets, Regulators

Deeply Powerful, Largely Unchecked

Wall Street chroniclers one day could look back at the early 21st century and easily dub it the Era of the Hedge Fund. The question is whether it will be remembered as an age of reason or irrational exuberance.

Hedge funds hold unparalleled sway over the financial markets, as confirmed by the recent unraveling of $20 billion in Bear Stearns funds. Portrayed as the new masters of the universe by author Tom Wolfe, hedge-fund managers are responsible for more than a third of stock trades and control more than $2 trillion worth of assets, according to industry researchers. Each of the top hedge-fund managers earned more than $1 billion in 2006 alone.

But like the Wizard of Oz, these funds hide behind a cloak of mystery as they pull the levers that make Wall Street go. "To a great degree they're unregulated and hardly understood or not understood at all," said James Grant, publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer.

Understanding the impact of this secretive world gained urgency in Washington after the crisis at the two Bear Stearns hedge funds sent the Dow Jones industrial average down 279 points and prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission to begin an informal investigation last week.

The Bear Stearns funds were on the cutting edge of the hedge-fund world that reaps billions of dollars from slicing up corporate loans, mortgages and other kinds of debt into pieces that can be traded like shares on the stock market. This process is considered by many bankers and regulators to be one of the great advances in finance over the past five years. With hedge funds acting like shock absorbers, investment banks and lenders have been able to make massive loans to freewheeling borrowers and feel less impact from the risk.

Money became easy to get and was easily lent. Banks offered huge mortgages to people with questionable credit. The business of borrowing billions of dollars to buy troubled companies boomed. Backed by hedge funds, insurance companies could offer coverage to homeowners in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Some analysts say hedge funds have become more important financiers than the long-established investment firms of Wall Street. Greenwich, Conn., where more than half of the biggest hedge funds are based, has earned nicknames such as "The New Wall Street" and "Hedgistan." It also has become one of the most important stops along the presidential campaign fundraising trail.

Yet the trouble at Bear Stearns is revealing that the system may not be as crash-proof as once thought. And it has left Washington regulators and Wall Street analysts with questions: How dependent has the new financial system become on hedge funds? Are their trades getting more risky? If one of them unravels, who absorbs those losses?

The answers are unclear, even to top economists. Part of the problem is that most hedge funds do not reveal much about their trading activities. Many operate offshore. Even for the ones that are based in the United States, no federal agency is empowered to regulate or watch their activities.

The SEC in 2004 passed a rule requiring hedge-fund managers to register with the agency and submit to some oversight. But a U.S. Court of Appeals struck down that rule in June 2006. Later that summer, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox testified to the Senate Banking Committee that hedge funds were operating in a "gap" in the SEC's authority, but he fell short of asking Congress to address the issue through legislation.

The President's Working Group on Financial Markets, which was founded after the collapse of hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, said in February that hedge funds needed no regulation.

Yet many market watchers worry that, shielded from regulators and operating in the dark, the biggest and most influential hedge funds might be making bets that put the entire financial system at risk. As the two Bear Stearns funds demonstrated, some hedge funds are investing large amounts of money in complex securities that are difficult to value accurately. And much of it is being done with borrowed money -- or "leverage" -- which can magnify returns but also exacerbate losses.