UPDATE, JUNE 7, 8:31 A.M.: Despite the tweets and reports about Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO) advising employees to hold off summer vacation plans due to a looming market meltdown, the Newport Beach-based financial juggernaut swears it ain't so.
A statement a PIMCO spokesman emailed in response to our original report on the next page follows . . .
]
PIMCO has not asked employees to cancel vacations. However like any other prudent investment manager we have been working over many months to prepare for a number of potential scenarios related to the situation in Europe. This is our responsibility to our clients as stewards of the assets they have entrusted us to manage, and consistent with how we have approached other periods of uncertainty.
Fingers crossed a worst-case scenario does not put millions of workers around the world on permanent summer vacation.
ORIGINAL POST, JUNE 6, 8:33 A.M.: Out on the Street, it ain't easy being a PIMCO.
The words and actions of Pacific Investment Management Co., the Newport Beach-based firm's billionaire founder Bill Gross and CEO Mohamed A. El-Erian invariably shake or settle world markets.
Take a rumored PIMCO summer vacation decree that led to panicked tweets and, some theorize, Friday's 274-point U.S. stock market plunge.
As Examiner.com reports, PIMCO staff was rumored to have been instructed to cancel summer vacation plans because of a looming market meltdown. Word got out to Todd Harrison, CEO of Internet media company Minyanville, who tweeted the following Friday:
Todd
M. Schoenberger, managing principal at the Blackbay Group and an
adjunct professor of Finance at Cecil College, confirmed:
JPM is JP Morgan, and the tweets coming on the worst day of the year for U.S. stocks did not escape the notice of the Examiner's Kenneth Schortgen Jr., whose report was picked up by the Mutual Fund Wire.
However, before making a direct link between the tweets and the wipeout of all the stock gains made this year, you should also know Schortgen mentions the head of the World Bank recently confirmed something big on the horizon will effect both Wall Street and Main Street.
But PIMCO's overall influence cannot be denied. What's going on in Europe concerns market analysts here, and some believe the beginning of the end there came when PIMCO threw Greece a cold shoulder months ago. To be fair, the U.S. housing market crash preceded that.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.