Like LBHI, I traded the WAMU preferreds years ago. At some point I backed away thinking the easy money had been made. I have not looked at in years. As I recall when I looked at it last I thought it was over. Could be wrong.
I have traded COPP and have a small position currently.
I have both preferreds lehman and wamu, gave releses these days blackout of any useful news at COOP board. However i think it was better to sell Pq when price was $90. Now it is endless wait with gift of crona free for all! No signs of any shareholder payment. It is amzing how uk holders got paid in full and nothing for north Americans!
Imagine you are a company with a failing business that is drowning in debt. On the bright side, you also possess a very valuable asset. This asset is unique because, unlike most assets, if you liquidate the business through a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, it will be extinguished and its value will not be realized by any shareholders or creditors. On the other hand, even if you substantially liquidate the business using Chapter 11, you can, thanks to an extraordinary ambiguity in the law, preserve this valuable asset. Even better, you can direct the value of this asset to your preferred stakeholders—whether they are shareholders or creditors—rather than have the asset’s value allocated among stakeholders according to bankruptcy’s absolute priority rule. You can do this because you have the most information about this valuable asset and because bankruptcy law and courts effectively ignore its existence, leaving you to allocate its value as you see fit. What is this unique asset? Valuable tax attributes, including net operating losses and credit carryovers. This scenario is not purely hypothetical; Solyndra and Washington Mutual, among others, have effectively used Chapter 11 to divert the value of tax losses and credits to a select group of shareholders and creditors in contravention of bankruptcy’s distributional norms. This Article recommends statutory revisions to the tax and bankruptcy laws to remove the unintended tax advantage and thus neutralize the tax consequences of corporate restructuring decisions.
Among others, Washington Mutual followed a similar path through Chapter 11, liquidating its business assets and reorganizing the parent to preserve nearly $18 billion in valuable tax attributes. Nonetheless, the bankruptcy court endorsed the Solyndra Plan in October over the objections of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the U.S. Trustee. The government argued that the principal purpose of the Solyndra Plan was tax avoidance, as evidenced by the fact that the parent would emerge from bankruptcy with valuable tax attributes and no active business. In approving the Solyndra Plan, the court reasoned that the parent’s business purpose was merely to serve as a holding company and that the valuable tax attributes would motivate the parent to continue its historical line of business of investing in companies.