How Dracula Hedge Funds Are Sucking Us Dry

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Les Leopold

How Dracula Hedge Funds Are Sucking Us Dry
What notion of economics or ethics justifies the fact that it would take the average family more than 35,000 years to earn as much as the top hedge fund managers earn in one year?

July 9, 2011 |


The official June unemployment rate is 9.2 percent. The real rate is 18.5 percent (which includes involuntary part-time workers and the unemployed who haven’t looked for jobs in the past 4 weeks.) Nearly 30 million Americans are unemployed and we need more than 21 million jobs to get back to full-employment (defined as 5 percent).

Meanwhile, the top 10 hedge fund elites make on average nearly $1 million an HOUR. We’ll never find the resources to solve the unemployment crisis until we redistribute some of this obscene wealth.

It starts by putting to rest the notion that hedge fund elites are just like any other. They are not. They make more money than everyone else, including our top movie stars and athletes...and they pay lower taxes.

.....(snip).....

In fact, we can now show that hedge funds helped to prolong the housing bubble, deepen the crash and profit along the way. No matter what their apologists say, those hedge fund profits came from trash securities that never should have seen the light of day. Not only didn’t they create positive value for the economy, they created billions of losses that led to bailouts, unemployment and massive public debt. Whether any of them engaged in outright fraud, we leave to the courts. It doesn’t matter. It was a monumental economic rip-off, whether legal or illegal. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/151569/how_dracula_hedge_funds_are_sucking_us_dry_/

[plumbob]

1. All of these derivative products should simply be illegal.

They produce nothing, and worse, they bleed everything else from the economy. For instance, Cantor the Republican is ultrashort on US government bonds. If the US defaults, he cleans up, yet he is part of the "team" "trying" to prevent default. Really?

Throw in prison or hang those who developed these parasitical inventions and outlaw them now.

[bemildred]

2. They are a fraud and a racket. nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. How do we find out which pols are shorting our goverment bonds????

[plumbob]

4. I'm searching for the general info, but here's the link that outed Cantor:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/DrObvious/eric-cantor-conflict-interest-debt-limit_n_893354_96238261.html

[plumbob]

5. It's at Open Secrets. I've used it for campaign donation info, but

didn't realize it also had their investments.

http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/index.php


And I found out that insider trading rules and laws do not apply to Congress. Interesting, yes?

[banned from Kos]

8. Well, Congress people are not "insiders" - you have to be on the

Board of Directors or an executive to be such.

Hillary Clinton was once on the BoD of Wal-Mart and Halliburton but is no more. Its a good question though - there may be a couple.

[plumbob]

9. No, Martha Stewart only had a boyfriend in management, but she

went to prison.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2004/07/16/marthasentence_04716.html


Stewart was convicted of selling almost 4,000 shares of ImClone Systems on Dec. 27, 2001, after being tipped that former ImClone CEO Sam Waksal was trying to dump his own shares in the company. Waksal is a friend of Stewart.

Prosecutors said Stewart and her former stock broker, Peter Bacanovic, then tried to cover up the reason for the trade.

Bacanovic also received a five-month prison sentence on Friday.


And from the SEC:

http://www.sec.gov/answers/insider.htm


Examples of insider trading cases that have been brought by the SEC are cases against:

Corporate officers, directors, and employees who traded the corporation's securities after learning of significant, confidential corporate developments;

Friends, business associates, family members, and other "tippees" of such officers, directors, and employees, who traded the securities after receiving such information;

Employees of law, banking, brokerage and printing firms who were given such information to provide services to the corporation whose securities they traded;

Government employees who learned of such information because of their employment by the government; and

Other persons who misappropriated, and took advantage of, confidential information from their employers.

Because insider trading undermines investor confidence in the fairness and integrity of the securities markets, the SEC has treated the detection and prosecution of insider trading violations as one of its enforcement priorities.

[saras]

6. They were and they can be again

[banned from Kos]

7. Funny, the Soros Quantum Fund is very successful and its owner

is 100% liberal to the point of giving everything away to defeat Teabaggers/GOP.

Money tends to break into liberal/conservative lines and it has nothing to do with profit.