Each business day HedgeCo.Net keeps you informed with the top hedge fund industry news, opinion and insight from around the globe. From the latest hedge fund launches, to the impact of regulation, competition, and investor activism - we track the topics and people that make a difference to you.
Center for Research on Globalization – The second wave of the world economic depression is coming soon. Larry Summers, the economics czar of the Wall Street puppet regime currently in power in Washington, recently confessed to the Financial Times in an unguarded moment: "I don’t think the worst is over .."
A few weeks earlier, Jacques Attali, who served in the 1980s as the main economics adviser to French President Mitterrand, told an audience at the International Economic and Financial Forum (FIEF) in Paris that the world might well soon face a planetary Weimar "in the form of a hyperinflationary depression similar to the German events of 1922 – 1923.
New York Times Blogs – Actor Javier Bardem has turned down a role in the sequel to Oliver Stone’s seminal 1980s treatise on greed, “Wall Street.” The Oscar winner was to have played the world’s villain du jour: a hedge fund manager. Forbes reported that the actor’s publicist said he turned down the role due to scheduling conflicts.
It was reported in June that Mr. Bardem was circling the project although he was not yet officially cast. Starring in the film are Michael Douglas, who will reprise his role as Gordon Gekko, and Shia LaBeouf. Shooting is expected to start next month.
Bloomberg – John Meriwether, who roiled global markets when Long-Term Capital Management LP collapsed in 1998, plans to shut his current hedge fund, according to a person familiar with the matter.
JWM Partners LLC is closing its main Relative Value Opportunity II fund after losing 44 percent from September 2007 to February 2009. Meriwether, credited with generating billions of dollars of revenue at the former Salomon Brothers in the 1980s through so-called relative value trades, returned an average of 1.46 percent a year with his new fund since opening in 1999, compared with 2.4 percent for the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fixed-Income Arbitrage Index.
Bloomberg – Billionaire investor George Soros said the current economic upheaval has its roots in the financial deregulation of the 1980s and signals the end of a free-market model that has since dominated capitalist countries.
Liberalization of the financial industry begun by the Reagan administration has led to a series of crises forcing government intervention, Soros told economists and bankers at a Feb. 20 private dinner at Columbia University in New York. The global recession, triggered by the collapse of the U.S. housing market, has “damaged the financial system itself,” he said.
Bloomberg – Brazil’s main airports are filled with the country’s fastest-growing import: Brazilians returning home after losing their jobs in the U.S., Japan and Europe.
They left their homeland for jobs in more developed countries years ago, and sent some of their wages to the struggling families they left behind. Now they are out of work, evicted from employer-supplied housing and arriving back home to an economy ill-equipped to absorb or help them.
Most of them are called dekasseguis, a Japanese word meaning “to leave work.” Brazil has the largest Japanese population outside Japan and during Latin America’s economic crises in the 1980s and early 1990s many Brazilians with Japanese ancestry moved to the island nation in search of better jobs. About 322,000 Brazilians work in Japan, making them the third-largest community of foreign workers there, according to Japan’s Ministry of Justice.
Asia Times Online – During the end of the 1970s into the 1980s, British Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the City of London financial interests who backed her introduced wholesale measures of privatization, state budget cuts, moves against labor and deregulation of the financial markets.
They did so in parallel with similar moves in the US initiated by advisers around Reagan. The claim was that hard medicine was needed to curb inflation and that the bloated state bureaucracy was a central problem.
