Daily Monitor – Wall Street may be bruised and battered, but it still donated more money than any other U.S. industry to President-elect Barack Obama’s inaugural festivities on Tuesday, a study has found.

The Center for Responsive Politics said executives of finance, insurance and real estate companies and their family members gave $7.1 million to Obama’s inaugural committee.

Top donors from the world of high finance included George Soros, Ronald Perelman and David Shaw, the center said.

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Times Online – Every week at least one British hedge fund is considering winding up its funds as catastrophic investment performance puts the sector under unprecedented pressure, an industry expert said yesterday.

Andrew Shrimpton, the former head of hedge fund regulation at the Financial Services Authority who now runs Kinetic, a consultancy, said: “The credit crisis is definitely kicking in for the hedge fund industry now. We are being approached by hedge funds considering voluntary fund liquidations on a weekly basis.”

His remarks came as CQS, one of London’s best-known hedge funds, wrote to its investors to say that its flagship $4.25billion CQS Fund had fallen 9.42 per cent for the year to date. Michael Hintze, its chief executive and senior investment officer, told investors that senior management at CQS were meeting as often as three times a day to monitor the fund and take action over its exposures where necessary. The fund, which specialises in convertible arbitrage – or small price differentials between bonds and underlying equities – is down more than 11 per cent for the year.

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