Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Why Are Hedge Funds Paid So Much? Because They Stabilized The Financial System and By Extension, Saved Civilization

FT Alphaville leads with a link as the jumping off point to a deeper question:
Tim Hartford directs us to a nice piece by John Cassidy in the New Yorker this week wondering why it is that hedge funds can still get away with making a killing when their performance is so underwhelming these days.
It is, in his opinion, a bit of a mystery....MORE
While, at Bloomberg:
...Lehman is still around.
Meanwhile in actual financial-crisis related stuff, you can still trade Lehman Brothers bankruptcy claims, which have made a lot of money for a lot of hedge funds, including over $1 billion for John Paulson. The losers seem to have been the big banks who were Lehman's counterparties and sold their claims early to hedge funds, so if you squint you can view these returns as the reward to these hedge funds for stabilizing the financial system in 2008...MORE
So there you go.