“I think it’s fair to say that if you look across the country, the deck is stacked in favor of those already at the top,” Hillary Clinton said at a roundtable in Iowa as part of her newly launched presidential campaign. The conversation with students and teachers at a community college focused on inequality and education, but Clinton took a dig at hedge funds as well, according to Bloomberg: “There’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay less in taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80” while driving from New York to Iowa.
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Kamunting Street Capital Management founder Allan Teh has had enough. “I’m the first to say: I can’t do it,” he told the Wall Street Journal, discussing his decision to return external capital to investors after losses tied to bets on junk bonds and energy companies and a generally negative climate for fixed income. “I just don’t think in this environment I can have a portfolio that mirrors what was done in the past.”
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“I never kicked a dog or smashed a computer or even yelled at anyone,” Curtis Macnguyen told Bloomberg , referring to the time in 2010 when his Ivory Flagship and Ivory Optimal hedge funds were struggling. “I was just frustrated and pissed off at having to keep explaining to investors that the environment was tough for our strategy. I’ve always felt that we’re in a no-excuse business. Just like high-level competitive sports, no matter how tough the conditions are, it shouldn’t matter, because you just have to be better than your competitors.”
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“It just takes a random billionaire to change a race and maybe change the country,” Trevor Potter, a campaign finance lawyer and Republican member of the Federal Election Commission, told the New York Times in reference to Renaissance Technologies co-CEO Robert Mercer’s backing of presidential candidate Ted Cruz. “That’s what’s so radically different now.”
