Breaking News: Bloomberg reports that Lehman to form a new company to buy mortgage assets

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Lehman may set up a company funded by outside investors to buy some of its mortgage assets, aiming to dispel investor concerns.

As most investors know, its pretty well-documented that the firm is trying to not only sell its money management arm but also maybe even trying to sell itself. Unfortunately, its tough to value a firm that wants to sell Neuberger for $9 billion while the whole firm (including the Neuberger piece) has a market cap of $9.5 billlion. With that said, the aforementioned article did grab my attention.

With respect to the Bloomberg article, I might be missing something here but I would be willing to bet that Lehman has already done something similar with R3 Capital Partners. In fact, I wonder why this would come as "breaking news"....hasn't this already been "broken" in their recent 10-Q:

The Company acquired non-voting, minority ownership stakes in the master fund, general partner, special limited partner and management company of R3 Capital Partners (collectively, “R3”), an asset manager of funds investing primarily in corporate bonds and loans. At May 31, 2008, the aggregate amount of the Company’s investment in R3 was approximately $1.1 billion, which was a minority investment in relation to the total, third-party investments in R3. The Company sold assets and transferred derivative risk of approximately $4.5 billion at fair value to R3...

I wonder what those "sold assets" might be. And that was as of May 30th. I also wonder how much more has been sold and/or "transferred" since then.

Time is running out for Lehman. With about three weeks before their next conference call, they must act quick or investors might act even quicker.