Goldman Sachs – Masters of the Eurozone

[Octafish]

16. I just GOOGLED "Fox News + Greece + John Paulson"...

Zip from the fair and balanced set. This from Forbes casuses one to ask: Could the hedge fund guy be playing both sides, er, hedging his bets?

This hedge fund manager just lost millions on Greece and Puerto Rico

by Stephen Gandel
Forbes, JUNE 29, 2015

One of the biggest losers in the Greek and Puerto Rican debt crises is hedge fund billionaire John Paulson.

Talk about a horrible way to start the week.

A number of hedge funds that were already bracing for losses on Greek debt also found out late Sunday night that they would likely have to swallow big losses on investments in Puerto Rico as well.

One of the biggest losers appears to be John Paulson. After the Greek government, his Paulson Special Situation Fund is the second-biggest shareholder of Piraeus Bank, which is one of the largest financial firms in Greece. Piraeus holds nearly a third of all Greek deposits. Over the weekend, the Greek government closed banks in Greece in order to prevent their collapse. Panicked depositors had already pulled roughly a billion euros out of them.

Paulson’s fund said it owned 6.6% of Piraeus at the end of the first quarter, which was the last time the fund filed its holdings. Greece also closed its stock market Monday, so shares aren’t trading. But as of Friday, the bank’s stock price, which had fallen 56% this year, was $0.40. It would certainly be lower today. Paulson could lose as much as $161 million on the investment.

There there’s Athens Water. Paulson put $137 million into the utility just a year ago, hoping to cash in on the fact that the monopoly was going private. That didn’t happen. And now Athens Water is having trouble collecting its bills from the government, which is out of cash. Paulson has already lost about $75 million on the investment, and he could lose much of the rest. Two years ago, Greece’s finance minister Yanis Varoufakis wrote a blog post criticizing Paulson’s investment in Greek banks.

Paulson has also been one of the biggest financial backers of Puerto Rico. Last year, he called the U.S. territory the Singapore of the Caribbean. In March 2014, Paulson’s fund was one of a number of hedge funds that bought into a $3.5 billion bond offering by the Puerto Rican government. Paulson reportedly bought $120 million of the bonds, according to the Wall Street Journal.

CONTINUED...

http://fortune.com/2015/06/29/john-paulson-greece-puerto-rico-hedge-funds/

Reading the two articles together and now it makes sense, how the smartest guy in the room could act so dumb.