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POPSOne of America's Wealthiest Men Charged With Insider Trading Raj Rajaratnam will appear in court later on today (Friday). Raj Rajaratnam will face both civil and criminal charges. He will face hefty fines and most likely jail time. Raj Rajaratnam Charged With Insider Trading Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/raj-rajaratnam-charged-wi_n_323879.html NEW YORK " One of America's wealthiest men was among six hedge fund managers and corporate executives arrested Friday in a hedge fund insider trading case that authorities say generated more than $25 million in illegal profits and was a wake-up call for Wall Street. Raj Rajaratnam, a portfolio manager for Galleon Group, a hedge fund with up to $7 billion in assets under management, was accused of conspiring with others to use insider information to trade securities in several publicly traded companies, including Google Inc. Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/raj-rajaratnam-charged-wi_n_323879.html
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POPS 6 Arrested in Inside Trade Case Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, said the charges show Rajaratnam's "secret of success was not genius trading strategies." "He is not the master of the universe. He is a master of the Rolodex," Khuzami said. Rajaratnam, 52, was ranked No. 559 by Forbes magazine this year among the world's wealthiest billionaires, with a $1.3 billion net worth. Also charged in the scheme are Rajiv Goel, 51, of Los Altos, California, a director of strategic investments at Intel Capital, the investment arm of Intel Corp., Anil Kumar, 51, of Santa Clara, California, a director at McKinsey & Co. Inc., a global management consulting firm, and Robert Moffat, 53, of Ridgefield, Connecticut, senior vice president and group executive at International Business Machines Corp.'s Systems and Technology Group. The others charged in the case were identified as Danielle Chiesi, 43, and Mark Kurland, 60, both of New York City.
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POPSThe Next Culture War "During this period, debt exploded. In 1960, Americans’ personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put liberals on one side and conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally. If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy."
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POPSDark Clouds Over The Economy, Courtesy of Smug, Harvard-"Educated" Liberals! Political Correctness : For years, Harvard depended on an aggressively managed investment fund guided by brilliant people. But then, the University assisted by the mainstream press went all PC on them, accusing them of the heinous crimes of being too successful and making too much money. By 2005, Jack Meyer had had enough. After 15 years at Harvard Management Company, frustrated by the circular fights about compensation, and sick of justifying himself to Summers and Rubin, he walked out and started his own giant hedge fund. Shamelessly, he took many of Harvard Management Company’s best people with him, about 30 portfolio managers and traders, along with the chief risk officer, chief operating officer, and chief technology officer. How well did the strategy of punishing the successful work? Not so well, it turned out. First, a directionless, caretaker regime lost half a billion dollars in a trendy hedge fund.
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POPSour loss is black rock's gain more at source- you may wanna check out..... it did go on to say.....Confused? you're supposed to be- that's the point of a successful hedge fund, a totally unregulated activity in which very rich people pool theeir $ in order to more effectively rip off the rest of us- and black rock is at the top of that game- managing $1.3 trillion in assets...... yadayada..now if that doesn't make ya want to follow the link here- not sure what would....
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POPSObama's theft... What is this man doing? Will he & Congress completely bankrupt our Country and destroy all of our futures?
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POPSThug Congress you will think as we want you to think or you will be punished. Sort of like Stalin and Mao, but with Americans.
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POPS Magna Cum Lousy Final Grade : C ~ Our list of the fancy colleges that trained the architects of today's economic crisis.
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POPS Chrysler Bond Holders Surrender "We're still opposing this and not signing the consents, but the active fight has been more challenging," Geoffrey Gwin, principal of the Group G Capital Partners LLC, told the AP . "Everybody's going along with it."
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POPSObama’s Auto Policy: All In The Democratic Family through the end of 2006 to lobby Congress, the White House, and the Department of Labor on a handful of bills regarding asbestos litigation and compensation. What was Quadrangle’s stake in asbestos legislation? Many hedge funds invested in ompanies damaged by asbestos lawsuits. These funds then lobbied for legislation that would alleviate some of the liability the companies faced, thus boosting companies’ stock value. Alternatively, a hedge fund could make the opposite play: Watch a vulnerable company’s stock rise as prospects improve for asbestos legislation, then short the company and lobby to kill the bill. So Rattner understands how public policy can create private profits. It should come as no surprise, then, that his auto plan involves upending bankruptcy law and precedent in favor of a system in which the winners and losers are chosen by politicians or their appointed “czars.”
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POPSJack Booted Thugs: You Will Submit Voluntarily, Or We Will Make You But many of the independent investors balked. ‘Financial Sacrifices’ The reasoning of the hold-outs was captured in a statement by OppenheimerFunds Inc., which said the government “unfairly asked our fund shareholders to make financial sacrifices greater than those being made by unsecured creditors.” Stories circulated that the Treasury Department exerted extreme pressure behind the scenes when investors refused to take the deal. Public pressure was exerted as well. President Barack Obama went to the podium to criticize the recalcitrant investors, and Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan pressed the threats even harder: “The rogue hedge funds that refused to agree to a fair offer to exchange debt for cash from the U.S. Treasury — firms I label as the ‘vultures’ — will now be dealt with accordingly in court,” Dingell said.
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POPSChrysler Bankruptcy Hardball: The Shape Of Things To Come That's a political payoff pure and simple. The senior secured creditors (many of which represent retirement funds and savings plans) said no. The Obama administration then deployed the brass knuckles. As one blogger notes, Car Czar Rattner got downright Nixonian about the resistance to The One: Confronting the head of a non-TARP fund holding Chrysler debt and unwilling to release it for any sum less than that to which it was legally entitled without compelling cause, this country's "Car Czar" berated the manager of said fund with an outburst of prose substantially resembling this: Who the f*ck do you think you're dealing with? We'll have the IRS audit your fund. Every one of your employees. Your investors. Then we will have the Securities and Exchange Commission rip through your books looking for anything and everything and nothing we find to destroy you with.
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POPSHang 'Em High!' The author is concerned that Obama will offer the pirates a bailout in the form of a ransom/tribute.
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POPSThese Hypocrites Oughta Make You Puke! Corruption,Lobbying, conflict of interest! Here's MORE: Carol Browner, assistant to the president for energy and climate change, disclosed earnings of between $1 million and $5 million from lobbying firm Downey McGrath Group, Inc., where her husband, Thomas Downey, is a principal. She states $450,000 in "member distribution" income, plus retirement and other benefits from The Albright Group, a lobbying firm whose principals include former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
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POPSFinancial industry paid millions to Obama aide While the article seems to take a stab at the Obama administraton, I am taking a stab at all these people in the Wall Street financial industry. All of these finance guys are involved in the largest ponzi and control scheme in the history of modern society. Having heard Douglas Rushkoff speak at Web2Expo it all makes much more sense on how big government and corps try to control society. Currency is simply one instrument in the big ponzi scheme. I just ordered Rushkoff's book "Life, Inc" which unravels this whole mess and offers some ways that we are normal citizens can win back control.
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POPSCategory 4 Financial Storm From JP Morgan's congressional testimony a few years after a major bank panic in 1907. An exchange between Morgan and his inquisitor for the government, attorney Samuel Untermyer. Untermyer: "Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?" Morgan: "No sir. The first thing is character." Untermyer: "Before money or property?" Morgan: "Before money or property or anything else. Money cannot buy it...because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom."
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POPSGreat New Hedge Fund Saw this humor site in WSJ's Heard on the Street this morning. Here's one of Strategery's top competitive advantages: "We are not limited to looking for opportunities with positive expected returns and so can cast a broader net across the investment universe, thus extending our efficient frontier beyond what other hedge funds can offer."
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POPSMy Hedge Fund to God Reminds me of one of my favorite stories of the crisis: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/09/georgetown_offers_condolences.html
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POPS George Soros: Lion in a Gazelle Cage? (helped in part by Soros’ own Cassandra act) but also because of deals like his recent purchase of IndyMac (one of the leading subprime mortgage lenders that closed because Senator Chuck Schumer talked too much). Given his newly-purchased influence in the White House, he will have great influence in how those new laws are written, if he doesn’t actually write some of them himself. He is about as likely to suggest regulations that will inhibit his ability to make money as a lion would be to suggest that he not be given the key to the gazelle cage at the zoo. Remember that Soros made a killing by shorting the British Sterling in 1992 on the day eventually known as Black Wednesday and was in the middle of the 1997 Asian financial crisis that collapsed at least one nation’s currency and threatened to do the same to several more. He is not in business to help any one but him.
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POPSHEDGE FUNDS are PYRAMID SCHEME - OFFICIAl The writing has been on the wall for a while but there is no denying it now.. the trouble is its not just hedge funds but any economy that relies on indefinite growth that is effectively a pyramid scheme, with an expanding population and natural resources filling in the bottom level~ until the natural resources run out... coming to a world near you SOON...............
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