Bloomberg- A year after Andrew Rabinowitz yanked his hedge fund’s cash from Bear Stearns Cos. because of concern the Wall Street firm wouldn’t make good on its trades, he’s ready to return.
For Rabinowitz’s New York-based Marathon Asset Management LLC, the lure is a prime brokerage that’s now part of JPMorgan Chase & Co., whose $1.6 trillion balance sheet is more than four times the size of Bear Stearns’s. JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon is counting on customers like Rabinowitz, some of whom helped bring Bear Stearns to its knees in March, to make his $1.36 billion takeover worthwhile.
After a run on Bear Stearns prompted a bailout by the Federal Reserve and the sale to New York-based JPMorgan, Dimon said one of Bear Stearns’s biggest attractions was its prime brokerage, which provides loans and processes trades for hedge funds. Bear Stearns lost as much as 40 percent of its so-called prime brokerage volume in the month after the March 16 acquisition.
