Home > Views > Blogs > Market Movers > What's an Easy Way to Buy Cheap Assets?
EMAIL
PRINT
RSS
SHARE
TEXT SIZE:
SHARE
Send a copy to me

Separate multiple email addresses (max 20) with commas.

0/1500

Main
Why do Regional Banks Hold Fannie an...   Why Citi Needs Rubin
Aug 26 2008 9:36AM EDT

What's an Easy Way to Buy Cheap Assets?

It's much, much bigger than regional banks buying GSE preferreds. You can buy Fannie and Freddie senior debt at significant spreads over the government which is guaranteeing it; hell, you can write credit protection on the US government and make non-negligible amounts of money doing so. More generally, there's a large number of bonds out there issued by non-leveraged companies which are nicely profitable and don't have significant funding needs, but which are still trading at all-but-distressed levels.

So here's my question: Let's say you're a buy-and-hold investor -- someone with a personal pension fund, say, which won't be touched for a couple of decades. You don't care much about mark-to-market losses, you just want to take advantage of some of the present craziness to buy good long-term assets on the cheap. I'm not talking distressed debt funds, or anything which requires active management: I'm just looking for a simple way of playing the reversion-to-making-sense trade. Is there one?

See more in

Loading...

Add Your Comment

Required fields are marked with an asterisk (*)
Add a comment

Recent Blog Posts

Archive

Previous
Dec
2008
Next


Also in Portfolio.com
Most Read
Most Emailed
Recently Commented