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.
Guardian.co.uk – The secretive hedge fund manager and philanthropist Chris Hohn last year donated almost half a billion pounds to the children’s charity run by his wife, it emerged yesterday.
The £486m gift follows hefty profits at Hohn’s hedge fund TCI in 2007, and beat the previous year’s donation of £276m. The financier has now donated more than £1bn in total, more than the gross domestic product of countries including Greenland and Antigua.
The funds will be given to the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), the charity that Hohn co-founded with his wife Jamie to help children in poor and developing countries, mostly in Africa, Asia and Central America.
Street.Com – The NABE survey of 105 forecasters was taken Dec. 17 through Jan. 8. In the survey, 52% said they expected gross domestic product to fall by more than 1% this year. GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced within the U.S. and is the best barometer of the country’s economic fitness. The last time GDP fell for a full year was in 1991, a tiny 0.2% dip. The economy shrank by 1.9% in 1982, when the country was suffering through a severe recession.
Forecasters have grown more pessimistic about the outlook. In the October survey, no forecaster thought GDP would fall by more than 1%.
Baltimore Sun – If there is anything we have learned from the crisis in the financial sector, it’s the urgent need for more regulation. Had federal regulators been more vigilant or wielded greater powers, all this suffering and heartache might have been averted. That’s the story we’ve been told, and it must bring a rare smile to the face of Bernard Madoff.
Mr. Madoff was the manager of a Wall Street investment fund that he allegedly confessed to his sons was "one big lie" and "a giant Ponzi scheme." But "giant" fails to capture the scale of his fraud, which may have lost $50 billion, more than the entire gross domestic product of most of the countries on Earth.
