Hedge funds were popularized in the mid 1960’s, and we recall those heady days vividly because a colleague felt that real estate holdings in his portfolio constituted hedging, and nobody else did, and the arguments over that watershed issue ran on and on for years because this new industry was trendy and he wanted in on the marketing bonanza. We’ve always associated hedge funds with another 60’s term, “go-go”, because it best references where, and sometimes with whom, most of those verbal free-for-alls took place.
Whatever, “hedging” is short-selling, not diversification, as our side has always held.
The industry suffered horrendous losses in the 1969 market adjustment to runaway inflation and in all the subsequent aftershocks that came to define the bloody 70’s. Somewhere along the way, a new generation of wealthy young upstarts, miffed that Wall Street Dons wouldn’t cut them in for a lion's share of the racketeering take, pulled out of the Families to run the same cons on their own. These lowlifes had to call themselves something, and the term, “hedge fund” was available, so they took it.
That industry spread out into amoral and/or illegal activities like job outsourcing and asset toxification and God knows what, and today hedge fund dealings have become as far removed from hedging as investment bankers have always been from investment banking.
Throughout all this, hedge fund Crime Lords poured vast sums of money into politics to, among other things, make absolutely certain nobody ever found out what they really did for a living. Democrats and Republicans alike have been tapping the payoff well for decades.
And so, it came as quite a shock to us here at your MacDougal Post when this morning’s cyber press reported that former employees of companies victimized by Carried Interest’s Crime Family are scheduled to spill at the Democratic National Convention.
Umama must feel that his back is really up against the wall.
Beyond that, in failing to mention Social Security, Medicare, Iraq, Afghanistan, and illegal immigration in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, Carried Interest made one point very clear: even he doesn’t consider himself qualified to sit in the Oval Office.
However, our political pundit, T. Watermelon Jones, still holds to his projections. Carried Interest will lose so much ground in the coming weeks that the Crime Families will have to trash financial markets by mid-October to bring the GOP back in the race. Watermelon is calling for a 30-50% crash on the New York Stock Exchange, which translates into a Republican rout this November. Carried Interest and The Boogeyman will win in a 65-35% landslide (and the Dow Jones Industrial Average will turn around big time the very next day, recovering its entire loss by 9:53 Eastern).
