New York Times Blogs – Bill Clinton has plenty of friends in high finance.

Lifting a longstanding cloak of secrecy, the former president last week released a complete list of about 208,000 donors to his foundation as part of an agreement to check against possible conflicts, as his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is in line to become the next secretary of state.

While the list has been heavily scrutinized from a geopolitical perspective, it is also interesting to note how many heavy hitters from the financial world were contributors.

Hedge funds were big donors to Mr. Clinton’s organization over the years. The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the charitable arm of the United Kingdom-based activist hedge fund, gave more than $25 million to the Clinton foundation, making it one of the top two donors on the list, along with Unitaid, an international organization that fights H.I.V and AIDS.

Other contributors from the hedge fund world included EIM Group’s Arpad Busson; Julian Robertson, the founder of Tiger Management; and Sterling Stamos Capital Management, the hedge fund founded by New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, who was recently stung by Bernard Madoff’s fraud. Each gave between $1 million to $5 million, records show.

Read Complete Article

Tags: arpad busson, bernard madoff, charitable arm, clinton foundation, fred wilpon, heavy hitters, high finance, hillary-rodham-clinton, julian robertson, mets owner, million records, mr clinton, new york mets, new york times, senator-hillary-rodham, senator-hillary-rodham-clinton, sterling stamos capital management, tiger management

West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – The following statement was issued by Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) President and CEO Jim Greenwood following the U.S. elections:

"On behalf of the more than 1,200 members of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, I offer our congratulations to Senator Barack Obama on his election victory.  We also offer our congratulations to the newly elected and returning members of Congress, governors and other elected officials across the United States.

"From health care to energy to climate change to environmental sustainability, President-elect Obama will enter office facing a daunting array of complex challenges threatening the well-being of our nation and the environmental health of our planet.

"Biotechnology is uniquely suited to help provide answers to these challenges.  Biotechnology provides hope for millions of people suffering from debilitating diseases like cancer, H.I.V.-AIDS, Parkinson’s and diabetes.  By reducing the incidence of disease, we can dramatically reduce health care costs and help spur economic growth.  Biotechnology provides the key to sustainable, renewable alternative fuels that increase our nation’s energy security.  And we develop crops that produce more food per acre while requiring less plowing, reducing fuel use, carbon dioxide emissions, and overall environmental impact.

"Biotechnology is one of the most promising sectors of America’s burgeoning innovation economy.  To continue our nation’s global leadership in innovation and continue to fulfill the promise of biotechnology, we will work with President-elect Obama and the new Congress to ensure that we have the proper public policies that promote and facilitate continued innovation.

"We must maintain strong protections for intellectual property – the key to an innovation economy – while enhancing patent quality and the objectivity, predictability, and transparency of the patent system.  We must increase resources for the federal Food and Drug Administration to enable the agency to keep pace with rapidly evolving biomedical science and make sound regulatory decisions in a timely and efficient manner.  We must provide the tax and investment incentives that promote continued biotech innovation and help accelerate the commercialization of advanced biofuels technologies.  And we must ensure the National Institutes of Health have the funding needed to sustain the public-private collaboration that is transforming biomedical discoveries into innovative treatments for patients.  At the same time, we need the proper policies and incentives at the state and local level to help grow and nurture biotechnology research and product development to ensure America remains the world leader in biotechnology innovation.

"We look forward to working with President-elect Obama, the new Congress and public officials at all levels of government to achieve these goals and continue to build our nation’s innovation economy.  Together, we can implement the public policies necessary to help heal, fuel, feed and clean our nation.”

BIO represents more than 1,200 biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotechnology centers and related organizations across the United States and in more than 30 other nations. BIO members are involved in the research and development of innovative healthcare, agricultural, industrial and environmental biotechnology products. BIO also produces the BIO International Convention, the world’s largest gathering of the biotechnology industry, along with industry-leading investor and partnering meetings held around the world.

Editing by Alex Akesson

For HedgeCo.Net
Email: alex@hedgeco.net

HedgeCo.Net is a premier hedge fund database and community for qualified and accredited investors only. Membership on www.hedgeco.net is FREE and EASY. We also offer FREE LISTINGS for Hedge Funds!

Tags: boston, csx, dealer-operations, due-diligence-service, federal-election-commission, global-bank, hillary-rodham-clinton, new-president, reform-proposals

New York Times – In an effort to cast himself as independent of the influence of money on politics, Senator Barack Obama often highlights the campaign contributions of $200 or less that have amounted to fully half of the $340 million he has collected so far.

But records show that one-third of his record-breaking haul has come from donations of $1,000 or more: a total of $112 million, more than Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his opponent in the Democratic primaries, raised in contributions of that size.

Behind those larger donations is a phalanx of more than 500 Obama “bundlers,” fund-raisers who have each collected contributions totaling $50,000 or more. Many of the bundlers come from industries with critical interests in Washington. Nearly three dozen of the bundlers have raised more than $500,000 each, including more than a half-dozen who have passed the $1 million mark and one or two who have exceeded $2 million, according to interviews with fund-raisers.

While his campaign has cited its volume of small donations as a rationale for his decision to opt out of public financing for the general election, Mr. Obama has worked to build a network of big-dollar supporters from the time he began contemplating a run for the United States Senate. He tapped into well-connected people in Chicago prior to the 2004 Senate race, and once elected, set out across the country starting to cultivate some of his party’s most influential money collectors.

Read Complete Article

Tags: ashe, bush-tax-cuts, chief-executive, federal-election-commission, hillary-rodham-clinton, presidential-contender, rising-cost-of-health-care, samsung, senator-hillary-rodham-clinton, senator-john-mccain