Bloomberg is reporting that Tom Marano, head of Bear Stearns’ mortgage unit, has been temporarily brought on board to help unwind the two troubled subprime hedge funds at the center of much media attention the past week or so.
Bear Stearns Cos. enlisted Tom Marano, the head of its mortgage unit, to help unwind two money-losing funds, according to a person with knowledge of the decision. Marano, 45, was assigned to Bear Stearns Asset Management temporarily to help Richard Marin, chief executive officer of the unit, and Ralph Cioffi, the manager of the two hedge funds, said the person, who declined to be identified because the decision hasn’t been made public. The firm has “brought in additional resources with expertise in these asset classes to facilitate the orderly de- leveraging process,” Marin said in a statement earlier today.
Marano, you’ll recall, is the same same guy who famously implied a few weeks back that Bear Stearns’ EMC Mortgage unit doesn’t consider the market position of its corporate parent when servicing the loans it owns. (Technically speaking, Marano only addressed consideration of Bear Stearns’ CDS positions). But that was then; and this is now. Would it be considered irony, then, that Marano’s now the guy tabbed to help unwind the two troubled hedge funds in question? Update: The above snarkiness notwithstanding, Marano’s got a solid background in this stuff, as Bloomberg highlights:
In 1987, Marano created the first real estate mortgage investment conduit, or Remic, an investment-grade bond that separates home-loan pools into different maturity and risk classes, for Fannie Mae. Seven years later, he helped underwrite the first commercial mortgage-backed security sold in tranches. Bear Stearns named Marano head of the mortgages in 2001. In a March presentation, Marano and Jeff Mayer, co-head of global fixed income, said mortgages were responsible for $927 million of Bear Stearns’s revenue growth from 2002 to 2006, or almost a quarter of the $4.3 billion total increase. “He’s one of the most experienced and savvy mortgage credit-risk managers on the Street,” said Thomas Pearce, who worked with Marano for 11 years and now is a managing partner at Vertical Capital LLC, a New York-based firm that manages collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.
