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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (632502)	10/19/2011 10:06:46 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575980

How can you rebut something some idiot makes up. Since they all make a billion dollars or four billion dollars a year or whatever strikes you when you post and pay little if any taxes, why don't you do it? If they want your wife, you'll get out of the house... What a weirdo you are. Worried about one of 'em taking your wife away?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (632502)	10/20/2011 8:56:16 AM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 1575980

Who invests in hedge funds? from The Enterprise Blog by Andrew Biggs The Occupy Wall Street movement has gone from fringe to mainstream. Not only has President Obama endorsed some of the Occupiers’ rhetoric, labor unions are supporting OWS with both money and manpower, sending their members to New York and elsewhere around the country to support the “99 percent” of Americans who apparently labor under the yoke of Wall Street profiteers. (If interested, you can sign up here courtesy of the Service Employees International Union.) But I think unions need to go further. As with any good boycott, you can’t just target the producers—you need to convince their customers that hedge fund managers aren’t pulling their weight in society. But who is it that invests their money with these blood-suckers? As it turns out, according to the investment research firm Prequin, the largest single investor in hedge funds is public employee pensions; that is, retirement plans that benefit many of the very people who currently are protesting against them. Public pensions hold 16 percent of all hedge fund assets, with private sector pensions—many of which serve heavily unionized industries—holding 14 percent. Oh, sweet irony. Moreover, rather than turning against hedge funds, public pensions have almost doubled their hedge fund holdings over the past three years. Ok, but maybe it’s not the employees’ choice to invest in hedge funds. After all, it’s pension boards—not employees themselves or their unions—that decide what investments to hold. But according to the Public Plans Database, current or retired public employees make up the majority of most public pension boards. Public employees and their unions know very well what they are investing in, and why. And while I may think that paying a hedge fund 2 percent of assets and 20 percent of profits (or more) is excessive, apparently public employees believe they are getting their money’s worth. And that’s the point: It’s their money to spend and they get to decide whether the fund manager is delivering returns to the fund that are worth what he charges. If not, there are plenty of other managers—and even passive index funds—that charge far less. But public pensions have decided that hedge funds are worth it. They get paid a lot of money because they create a lot of money. In simple terms, public employees have decided that hedge fund managers have earned what they are paid. ht lindybill