Last month, I wrote about pressure on state pension funds, many of which are underfunded and are facing immense pressure to chase higher returns. I profiled a $125 million investment made by the New Mexico Educational Retirement Board (NMERB) into Gramercy, a Connecticut-based hedge fund.
As we showed last month, there were some gaps between what Gramercy disclosed to NMERB and what we found in official records. Now Gramercy is making big news as a potential facilitator of a settlement between Argentina and holdout creditors. According to news reports, Gramercy and other bondholders who took Argentina's 2010 bond exchange are pushing a settlement.
Apparently this has been in the works for a while, according to a presentation Gramercy made to New Hampshire's retirement fund in 2012. Click here to download a 47-page pdf version. We obtained this via New Hampshire's Right-to-Know law. Note the detail on page 22 on Gramercy's plan to facilitate a settlement between Argentina and its creditors.
It's worth noting that Argentina is in defiance of more than 100 court judgments ordering it to pay U.S. creditors, and Argentina has said that it would never pay holdout creditors. The stakes are high for Gramercy, which holds bonds that could be defaulted on should Argentina refuse to settle with holdouts.
Related:
State Pension Funds and Big Investment Firms: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
