Hedge fund managers make BILLIONS while american's get screwed

reply to post by jam321


motherjones.com...

It was money well spent: Schumer agreed to support a repeal of the rule only if taxes were also raised on things like venture-capital and real-estate partnerships, a stand that guaranteed resistance from enough interest groups to let the hedge funds' special treatment survive unscathed. A million-dollar investment had allowed the hedge fund industry to keep a billion-dollar loophole. Not a bad return.

Originally posted by jam321
reply to post by David9176

 

I find it difficult to criticize people for becoming wealthy or wealthier as long as their doing it legally.

IMO, they took a gamble and it paid off big time. It is not their fault that the tax liabilities are in their favor.

Congress set the limit(loophole) and as early as february of last year, Obama talked about closing this loophole. Yet, neither Congress nor Congress took serious action.

Levin has several times sponsored a bill to change the tax treatment of investment income earned by private equity, hedge funds and certain other managers. Currently the income is treated as a dividend income, taxed about approximately 15 percent.

Advocates argue that is a huge tax break for the wealthy managers, and their income should face an ordinary tax rate. The top tax rate is now 35 percent.

The bill, backed by President Barack Obama, has passed the House three times but meets fierce lobbying by industry and has never progressed in the Senate, where it faces opposition from some Democrats and most Republicans.

www.reuters.com...

Jam, I think D might be more upset with a system that rewards success and failure just as equally...

Thats my take if I read between the lines.

reply to post by drew hempel


George Soros...he's part of Glen Beck's platform of hate an brings him up CONSTANTLY.

He's number 2 on this list. He's destroyed currencies...he helped bring out the Euro.

But F that...F common sense.

Go watch Fox News, MSNBC, or any other corporate BS network that all of yo buy into and continue to screw yourselves.

Praise the lord for billionares who continue to leech on our standard of living.

LET'S DEFEND THEM. IT'S COOL.

reply to post by Janky Red


Further more, the American system does not seem to value REAL work that is not
based upon the pushing paper and fake binary based "money". Now we reward
Stardumb and manipulation more than the things that built this nation in the first place.

I agree with OnceReturned that there is no reason to blame most hedgefunders per se. They are not taking government handouts. In fact hedgefunds have the potential to serve as a powerful counterweight to the excesses of the white shoe firms.

There are people in the financial world at whom ire would be more properly directed. Greenspasm/Helicopter commander Bernanke share a great deal of blame for our current predicament. Certain firms such as Morgan, Goldman, and others have done a number of eyebrow-raising things over the last few years to say the least. The gov't bailout of AIG sent money directly into Goldman pockets as counterparties. Meanwhile lots of big banks are sitting on tons of cash but refuse to lend. If you are going to talk about financial people ripping off the taxpayer, these people are much closer to the eye of the storm than hedgefund managers.

A visceral anger at a widening rich-poor divide is warrented because ultimately it undermines the basic fabric and cohesiveness of society. People are right to want more restraint and (dare I say it) effective regulation of the financial world. But be ware of wildly pointing fingers at every aspect of the industry.

Oh yeah, as to this "hedge fund managers make money for people so they should make whatever the market pays them" stuff.

For once, I'm with the commie.

The only reason hedge fund managers make such retarded money is because they are doing so at the expense of the tax payer. The major government pension funds and other tax payer entities are what drive the massive funds. If this was all private loot, I wouldn't have a problem with it - but its not.

These managers wouldn't be making the billions they do without government in there pumping them full of tax dollars.

These guys aren't like CEOs that hold stock portfolios. The hedge fund managers get paid no matter if the fund goes up or the fund goes down.

Its a win win for them on the backs of the tax payer.

And, as was already pointed out, they are only paying 15% capital gains on that loot - which is far far faaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrr below what your average burger flipping chump pays in taxes as a portion of his income.

Originally posted by David9176
reply to post by drew hempel

 

George Soros...he's part of Glen Beck's platform of hate an brings him up CONSTANTLY.

He's number 2 on this list. He's destroyed currencies...he helped bring out the Euro.

But F that...F common sense.

Go watch Fox News, MSNBC, or any other corporate BS network that all of yo buy into and continue to screw yourselves.

Praise the lord for billionares who continue to leech on our standard of living.

LET'S DEFEND THEM. IT'S COOL.

AH

how ironic that Beck's boss and George have a friendly competition that succeeds based upon one anothers success and failure equally.

Like a plumber who gets paid the same for installing a toilet that launches a turd or flushes turd.

[edit on 1-4-2010 by Janky Red]

reply to post by Janky Red




[edit on 1-4-2010 by drew hempel]

reply to post by silent thunder


motherjones.com...

The New York Fed stepped in and arranged a bailout. Almost all of Wall Street's biggest firms participated, and they did so for one reason: The Fed convinced them that LTCM was too big to fail. An uncontrolled bankruptcy might set off a domino effect that could bring down dozens of banks. A few months later, an interagency report concluded, "The near collapse of LTCM illustrates the need for all participants in our financial system, not only hedge funds, to face constraints on the amount of leverage they assume." It was a bipartisan judgment, signed by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and by Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's treasury secretary.

Originally posted by mnemeth1
Oh yeah, as to this "hedge fund managers make money for people so they should make whatever the market pays them" stuff.

For once, I'm with the commie.

The only reason hedge fund managers make such retarded money is because they are doing so at the expense of the tax payer. The major government pension funds and other tax payer entities are what drive the massive funds. If this was all private loot, I wouldn't have a problem with it - but its not.

These managers wouldn't be making the billions they do without government in there pumping them full of tax dollars.

These guys aren't like CEOs that hold stock portfolios. The hedge fund managers get paid no matter if the fund goes up or the fund goes down.

Its a win win for them on the backs of the tax payer.

And, as was already pointed out, they are only paying 15% capital gains on that loot - which is far far faaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrr below what your average burger flipping chump pays in taxes as a portion of his income.

And I am with the NEOCON

its a great system, in fact the only job market where you get rewarded for epic failure

Would be like paying a surgeon for directly linking the corroded artery and intestinal tract during a surgery.

Magic

"he craps blood and circulates turd, this operation is a success!!!"

[edit on 1-4-2010 by Janky Red]

reply to post by jam321


Jam....

It's not about hating the rich. That has nothing to do with it....not at all. I have a boss...I respect him. It's a small business and he's keeping me employed. I've survived, so far, through this economic mess.

But the big boys do not care... the international corporations...they don't care about you and me.

Too many people are confused with...oh, it's ok for them to profit....but overlook that their profits are syphoning wealth out of our country.

People have been brainswashed with Reaganomics/Clintomics....which only benefits the extremely wealthy.

THAT is why our government is broken. It's not socialist, marxist, conservatives, liberals, or any of that. People are watching FAR to much television.

It's corporatism and international influence that is breaking us.

Business in America, according to Citi Group's leaked "plutonomy" memo, is a "managerial aristocracy," rather than whatever else you think it is.

What that means, basically, is that the poor/middle classes largely do not matter, because wealth and spending is generated by the top 5% of the income earners in the country, rather than the other 95% of the country; everybody else has a place somewhere in the hierarchy which is largely "run" (ruled) by the top 5%.

Another way of saying it is: Instead of the people who work at walmart owning an equal share in the walmart they work at, they own nothing, but instead provide all the collective labor, for which they get only a fraction of the fruits back, which is owned and administered by an ever escalating chain of authoritarian managers with broader authority over their proprietary domains; or, "managerial aristocracy."


What those hedge funds are doing is pure capitalism. If there were a science that dealt specifically with making money in a capitalist environment, those hedge fund guys would surely be the men walking around in lab coats, mixing dangerous chemicals together -- producing large explosions and token plumes of white smoke.

Markets are designed to weed out large returns on investments. IE, they're designed to limit profits. That is the point of the market -- to keep profits just high enough for work/trade to continue, but no more than what is necessary. When a bigger return is generated than what is necessary for work to continue, that is what's known as an "inefficiency." What people on wall street are doing is called "bringing efficiency to the market," and they do this by (in the most simplistic terms) buying underpriced securities and selling overpriced securities; In reality, it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's fundamentally what they're doing, when you reduce the complexity enough to get a comprehensible view.


I don't think this is necessarily helpful to anybody in the normal economy, but it is fitting with the idea of having a managerial aristocracy --- a world run largely by the strategies, capital, and property of a small few, by the exploitation of the large majority.

Originally posted by Kaytagg
Business in America, according to Citi Group's leaked "plutonomy" memo, is a "managerial aristocracy," rather than whatever else you think it is.

great point and analysis

S for you

[edit on 1-4-2010 by Janky Red]

reply to post by Kaytagg


Here's the "science" of the hedge fund scam:

www.hoanewsnetwork.com...

Say you're working for the commodities desk of a big investment bank, and a major client — a pension fund, perhaps — calls you up and asks you to buy a billion dollars of oil futures for them. Once you place that huge order, the price of those futures is almost guaranteed to go up. If the guy in charge of asset management a few desks down from you somehow finds out about that, he can make a fortune for the bank by betting ahead of that client of yours. The deal would be instantaneous and undetectable, and it would offer huge profits. Your own client would lose money, of course — he'd end up paying a higher price for the oil futures he ordered, because you would have driven up the price. But that doesn't keep banks from screwing their own customers in this very way.

To help them screw their own clients, the major investment banks employ high-speed computer programs that can glimpse orders from investors before the deals are processed and then make trades on behalf of the banks at speeds of fractions of a second. None of them will admit it, but everybody knows what this computerized trading — known as "flash trading" — really is. "Flash trading is nothing more than computerized front-running," says the prominent hedge-fund manager. The SEC voted to ban flash trading in September, but five months later it has yet to issue a regulation to put a stop to the practice.

Several of you in this thread really have no clue how hedge funds work or how they are supported. If the big banks wouldn't have gotten bailed out by the government i.e. middle americans who some of you think are "lazy" and "stupid" these guys would have gone broke. I mean some of you in this thread are real idiots. You have no clue how a real economy works. These hedge fund managers are the same as the bankers. The US government has single handedly propped up the stock market through propping up the banks to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars.

But some of you are absolutely right.......middle class people are dumb.........for supporting their government and supporting the idea that if ONE individual can make as much as some of these guys are making it must somehow trickle down to them. It's this mindset that allowed the 18th century robber barons to become so influential and basically control every aspect of the US economy and the direction of the US as a country. Rockefeller single handedly was more influential in the direction we've been headed in the last 100 years than any other single individual. Some of you really have no idea just how powerful this family was and is. He created the medical racket we now have today..............he created the oil racket we now have...........

I don't know what's worse........that these guys are making this much money on the backs of hardworking Americans........or there are other Americans that see it as the way things are and actually encourage it. Wow. No wonder we have no free market. It's been rigged and the wool has been pulled over so many people's eyes.

[edit on 1-4-2010 by Zosynspiracy]

reply to post by Zosynspiracy

I don't know what's worse........that these guys are making this much money on the backs of hardworking Americans........or there are other Americans that see it as the way things are and actually encourage it.

reply to post by Kaytagg



You're forgetting one minor point..............this "managerial corporate aristocracy" exists due to the US government kleptocracy........i.e. they rob and steal from the people. Bottomline is the US government takes in more revenue than all of corporate enterprise in the United States. Without the US government and their hired goons i..e the legal system, the IRS, the FBI, the DEA, the CIA.......ad nauseum..........wallstreet wouldn't exist in the form that it does. If the US banking system was an honest, transparent one..........operated by the people and for the people............hedge funds wouldn't even exist and these insane amounts of money wouldn't exist. So you're absolutely right...........but kleptocracy allows everything else to happen.

And I love how all of you sit there and act like this "wealth" has any real value these hedge fund managers acquire. It's all on paper. It's not gold sitting in a vault. It's not real estate.......it's not farms, it's not anything but numbers on a computer. And that's how they make their money.

The country I once believed so valiantly in is a joke. America isn't even worth fighting for anymore. We are a bunch of brainwashed little people fighting for the scraps from the slice government and corporate America take from us...........we bow down like good little boys and girls and say thank you mr. government and mr. ceo............thank you for my pathetic existence........thank you for telling me how to crap, when to crap, what to take to crap, what to wipe my arse with, and what to crap in...........



[edit on 1-4-2010 by Zosynspiracy]

Originally posted by Zosynspiracy
reply to post by Kaytagg

 

You're forgetting one minor point..............this "managerial corporate aristocracy" exists due to the US government kleptocracy........i.e. they rob and steal from the people. Bottomline is the US government takes in more revenue than all of corporate enterprise in the United States. Without the US government and their hired goons i..e the legal system, the IRS, the FBI, the DEA, the CIA.......ad nauseum..........wallstreet wouldn't exist in the form that it does. If the US banking system was an honest, transparent one..........operated by the people and for the people............hedge funds wouldn't even exist and these insane amounts of money wouldn't exist. So you're absolutely right...........but kleptocracy allows everything else to happen.

And I love how all of you sit there and act like this "wealth" has any real value these hedge fund managers acquire. It's all on paper. It's not gold sitting in a vault. It's not real estate.......it's not farms, it's not anything but numbers on a computer. And that's how they make their money.

The country I once believed so valiantly in is a joke. America isn't even worth fighting for anymore. We are a bunch of brainwashed little people fighting for the scraps from the slice government and corporate America take from us...........we bow down like good little boys and girls and say thank you mr. government and mr. ceo............thank you for my pathetic existence........thank you for telling me how to crap, when to crap, what to take to crap, what to wipe my arse with, and what to crap in...........

[edit on 1-4-2010 by Zosynspiracy]

I think it is clear

you must crap into the things you ingest before you ingest them.

S for you too

reply to post by Zosynspiracy


Zyn......I hope there are more people out there like you.

People have, crazily, forgotten that we bailed out ALL OF WALL STREET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And now these SOB's are making billions of dollars while we all take the hit.

It's BS...it's ridiculous...and it's about GD time people wake up from the crazy nonsense.

Well, it's not all "fake" money. You need money to make money in all aspects of American business.

You can't open up a restaurant without taking a loan out from the bank, right? Neither can you take advantage of pricing inefficiencies in governments bonds without the requisite capital to buy a pair of bonds in the first place (as an example).

Such is the nature of the "system" we've chosen to rule our lives.. I think we chose poorly, but what do I know.


They do use "real" money, though, and they're buying/selling real assets, and pocketing the difference in prices between them. That's how they bring efficiency to the market. Eventually, everybody will make the same % return. That's what this is theoretically leading towards. No more large returns by some people, while others make 4-5% and that's it.

Personally, I don't think that day will ever come, but that's what all these innovations and new trading strategies are seeking to do.