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

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