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Fannie/Freddie Flameout: Winners and Losers

I am not sure that Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) will make it through the month as public companies. Barron's quoted an anonymous senior official -- who sounds an awful lot like Hank Paulson to me -- that unless Fannie and Freddie could raise at least $10 billion each, the government would bail them out while wiping out common shareholders and eliminating the preferred dividend. Since then, investors have been dumping shares of Fannie and Freddie like there's no tomorrow.

Who wins and who loses if Fannie and Freddie's shareholders are wiped out? As I said on CNBC's Power Lunch this afternoon, the winners are investors who shorted Fannie and Freddie years ago and are now reaping enormous profits. I also think that some Wall Street investment banks will win big as they get the job of selling off Fannie and Freddie's pieces. The losers are their biggest common and preferred shareholders -- including some well known mutual funds.

The winners are:

  • Jim Rogers, Rogers Holdings - Rogers originally shorted Freddie and Fannie in March 2006 and appeared on Bloomberg on November 20, 2007 to discuss why he did it and where he thought their stocks would go.
  • Doug Noland, Prudent Bear - As I posted, since the late 1990s, Noland's research has concluded that Freddie and Fannie would "shudder" when the US credit bubble eventually burst. Noland has profited from the short bets he made -- but he says it is emotionally painful to watch them fail.

Continue reading Fannie/Freddie Flameout: Winners and Losers

Large Yahoo shareholder raises questions about vote on Yang

Capital Research Global Investors owns, with related but separately managed funds, around 16% of the outstanding shares of Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), and hasn't been too pleased with the leadership of CEO Jerry Yang. So it advised its funds to vote against reelecting him to the board of directors.

Now the fund is puzzled that Yang managed to get 85% of the votes cast in election. Given that it meant to withhold its 16% stake from supporting Yang, it's concerned that -1% of the company's other shareholders did the same.

Capital Research has hired independent vote counter Broadridge Financial Solutions to take a look and try to figure out what happened.

Yahoo was quick to defuse any conspiracy theories, issuing a statement saying that "Yahoo did not participate in the execution of the votes and was not a party to any errors which may have been made either by a voting institution or a proxy processing intermediary acting on behalf of banks, brokers and institutions."

We won't know anything until the results of the Broadridge recount are made public but it sure seems like the shareholder support of Yahoo is less widespread than it seemed. That's understandable given the stock's dismal performance in recent years.

Symbol Lookup
IndexesChangePrice
DJIA+44.2910,291.26
NASDAQ+15.822,166.90
S&P 500+5.501,098.51

Last updated: November 12, 2009: 06:56 AM

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