Bankers Trust New York Corp. on Monday will launch a unit to manage high-yield investments for its clients, the company said.
The new "global high-yield asset management unit" will oversee client portfolios in junk bonds, mezzanine debt, and bank loans of U.S. and foreign corporations.
The New York bank company, the nation's seventh largest, recruited Stephen Freidheim and James Tucker to run the unit.
Solid Credentials
The two men most recently worked at Nomura Corporate Research and Asset Management, where Mr. Freidheim was head trader, director of research, and a member of board of directors. They were previously with Kidder, Peabody's high-yield assets management subsidiary, which was run by Mr. Tucker.
Mr. Tucker also has worked at Kidder's investment banking unit, where he specialized in merchant banking and international transactions.
|Tremendous Opportunities' Seen
At Bankers Trust, Mr. Tucker will oversee structuring and marketing of high-yield products, as he did at Nomura.
Bankers Trust said the new unit will be part of its Global Investment Management division, which has $155 billion of assets under managemet. About $65 billion of that is in actively managed fixed-income porfolios.
"The U.S. high-yield market is moving from recovery over the past two years toward becoming a permanent part of the American capital markets," said Ivan Wheen, managing director and head of Global Investment Management.
"We see tremendous opportinities for investors in both the U.S. and the rapidly expanding foreign high-yield corporate and sovereign debt markets."
Collateralized Bond Pioneers
Mr. Freidheim, a graduate of Yale University, will be responsible for portfolio management and trading.
He and Mr. Tucker, a graduate of Harvard law and business schools and a former lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, helped create the first public collaterized bond obligation in 1989 when they were at Kidder, Bankers Trust said.
The pair has since created more than $4 billion worth of high-yield structured investment products, according to Bankers Trust.
