Death of the New America High Income Fund

The New America High Income Bond Fund, (HYB) was a fund whose sole purpose was to continue to supply compensation to all concerned with the fund. Shareholders have been bagged in this name since Patsy Ostrander became part of the "daisy chain" at Drexel Burnham Lambert. From coming public at $50 per share to the 2008 low of $3.20 this fund has to be one of the top, dismal, miserable, unbelievably crappy funds ever to exist. It was run for the sole benefit of the insiders over all those years. What an ugly history of greed and corruption, to say nothing of poor management by whatever clown shop was in charge until it folded last month.

I wrote the following on the HYB Seeking Alpha website comments in July of 2023.

Dean Parisian

In 2023 is Patsy Ostrander still lurking around in her high yield playground or is that her on a museum investment committee these days? Never forget, Mike Milken, a once felon now pardoned by Trump, is worth probably $4 billion after getting his trading desk caught spinning bonds with the HYB crew back in the 80's. Looks like HYB President Ellen Terry is still involved, taking out about $300,000 every year, working it diligently for a career in several roles at HYB since inception! Wow, imagine a lifetime of putting the hammer down on shareholders! Hopefully her net worth isn't down that much but she only owns less than 35k shares. Former HYB Board member the late Franko Modigliani had it right. He didn't know a thing about the workings of the high yield market but did know a bit about economics. Unfortunately he learned about daisy-chains and warrants and leverage rather quickly! The HBS Case Study did a good job laying out the story on Patsy Ostrander. Franko was a good guy and well ahead of his time. The Modigliani-Miller theorem implies that, for a closed economy, state borrowing is merely deferred taxation, since state spending can be financed only by "printing money", taxation, or borrowing, and therefore monetary financing of state spending implies the subsequent imposition of a so-called "inflation tax," which ostensibly has the same effect on permanent income as explicit taxation.

On HYB, truth be told, my stance hasn't changed in 25 years! This fund is run for the benefit of those involved! Look at the performance since inception! It came public at $50 a share!! NAV is only down about 85%! Run by the insiders for the benefit of the insiders! They have to be careful to keep it alive so they can keep milking it, T. Rowe needs all the revenue it can muster. Putting lipstick on this security and keeping it alive must take a hell of a lot of work. Good luck if you own HYB.

Jul. 19, 2023

8:15 PM