The men with ‘more money than God’
November 17, 2008 ·
THEY are the five best paid hedge fund managers in the world. Between them, they earned US$12.6 billion ($19.10b) last year. This, at a time when the financial world was beginning to melt down.
Mr George Soros, Mr Kenneth Griffin, Mr Philip Falcone, Mr Jim Simons and Mr John Paulson were hauled before the US Congress yesterday and assailed over their huge salaries, their tax perks and their contribution to the credit crisis that has engulfed the globe.
The men, however, declared themselves innocent of causing the market meltdown, The Independent reported.
One Congressman, Democrat Elijah Cummings disagreed. He said: ‘These five citizens have more money than God.’
Here are their stories…
George Soros, 78
Soros Fund Management
Paid last year: US$2.9 billion
Famed as ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’, after netting more than US$1 billion by betting the pound would fall out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, Mr Soros has attacked unfettered free market capitalism as being at the root of today’s crisis.
With an estimated current net worth of around US$9 billion, he isranked by Forbes as the 99th-richest person in the world.
In 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad blamed Mr Soros for undermining South East Asian economies by destabilising their currencies, and famously called him a ‘moron’.
But in 2006, Mr Mahathir Mohamad met Mr Soros and said he accepted the latter was not responsible for the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
Jim Simons, 70
Renaissance Technologies
Paid last year: US$2.9 billion
The world’s most expensive hedge fund manager, he is considered a mathematical genius. He charges clients 5 per cent a year, plus a whopping 44 per cent of returns beyond a certain level. His fund runs ‘black box’ programmes that harvest tiny profits from millions of automated trades.
Renaissance’s Medallion Fund – which uses computers and trading algorithms to invest in world markets – returned more than 50per cent in the first three quarters of last year.
For all of his achievement and material success, Mr Simons’ life has been beset by the kind of tragedy that few parents can fathom – the death of not one but two of his five children in separate accidents.
In 1996, his son Paul, 34, was struck by a car and killed while riding a bicycle near Mr Simons’ home in Long Island, New York.
In 2003, 24-year-old son Nick drowned while on a trip to Bali.
John Paulson, 52
Paulson & Company
Paid last year: US$3.7 billion
Having run an obscure fund for 14years, he last year made what rivals called ‘the greatest hedge fund trade of all time’.
As a result, Mr Paulson traded up in the Hamptons, the upstate playground for New Yorkers, and bought a lakeside compound for US$41million.
The Financial Times says he is the one figure who correctly identified the growing bubble in the US housing market.
His best-performing credit fund was up almost 600 per cent last year. That, in turn, made him the highest-earning hedge fund manager, with pay of US$3.7 billion, according to Alpha magazine.
A sharp-suited New Yorker with a taste for luxurious homes and a penchant for quoting Winston Churchill, he lives in a 2,600 sq m five-storey townhouse on New York’s Upper East Side built in 1916.
Philip Falcone, 47
Harbinger Capital Partners
Paid last year: US$1.7 billion
Born in Minnesota, he was the youngest of nine kids who grew up in a three-bedroom home in a working-class neighbourhood.
His father is a utility superintendent who never made more that US$14,000 a year, while his mother worked in the local shirt factory.
Mr Falcone went to Harvard where he received an AB in Economics in 1984. After college, he went on to pursue his first love, hockey, although an injury cut short a professional hockey career abroad.
He made his fortune trading junk bonds in the ’80s. His firm was founded in 2001 and made another fortune last year betting against sub-prime mortgages. His two funds boasted 114 and 176 per cent returns in 2007.
Dubbed the Midas of Misery by BusinessWeek, he made tens of millions of dollars on an earlier wager that Bear Stearns and other financial stocks would collapse.
Ken Griffin, 40
Citadel Investment Group
Paid last year: US$1.5 billion
Last year, it looked as if he would become one of the world’s biggest financial players after buying up many distressed funds, banks and brokers. Now he is fighting to save his fund after losing 35 per cent of it this year.
Mr Griffin began in 1987 by trading convertible bonds as a sophomore from his Cabot House dorm room at Harvard University with US$265,000 from his mother, grandmother and two other investors.
He lives in a penthouse in Chicago that he bought for US$6.9million in 2000.
In 1999, he bought Paul Cezanne’s ‘Curtain, Jug and Fruit Bowl’ for US$60.5 million, the most ever paid for one of the French Impressionist artist’s paintings.
He keeps a row of management- theory books on a credenza behind his desk, and he says he tries to emulate one of America’s most celebrated business leaders, former General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welch.
Hat tip Aftermathnews
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centurean2 // April 2, 2009 at 1:10 pm |
George Soros & Sir Mark Malloch Brown
Buzz up!By David Rhodes, Special to the Tribune-Review
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Home Delivery
Willie Sutton was an all-American bank robber who had a few words of advice for those who wanted to be rich in the 1930s: “I go where the money is.”
If it was true for the original “Slick Willie,” it is equally true for George Soros and his friend Mark Malloch Brown in 2007.
George Soros was born in Hungary on Aug. 12, 1930, and came to the U.S. in 1956 after getting a degree from the London School of Economics. He turned a little of his own money into an enormous fortune through his skills in managing hedge funds and currency trading.
Soros is best known as the president of his own hedge fund, the Quantum Fund, and president of the Open Society Institute. He has been married and divorced twice and had three children by his first wife, Annaliese, and two by his second, Susan. His two eldest sons, Robert and Jonathan, are active in the Soros Fund. Soros is also a prolific, but little-read, author, a less-than-articulate public speaker and an inveterate meddler.
George Soros, who will be 77 in August, is, according to the gossip columns, dating Queen Noor, 55, of Jordan, the widow of King Hussein. Other recent girlfriends of the philanthropist are said to include violinist Jennifer Chun and a former Miss Russia, Anna Malova.
One time Soros made himself a $1 billion profit when the British pound was devalued. With the profit went a pseudo-title, “the man who broke the Bank of England.” Reports say that last year the Quantum Fund paid him $7 million.
Soros is now said to have amassed a fortune of $7 billion and uses masses of dollars for the sole purpose of bringing about the political defeat of President George W. Bush and the dismissal of Republicans from any American affairs of state. To observers, his tactics appear to consist of the purchase of the Democratic Party and of many of their causes.
Soros did not learn the tricks and turns of politics and currency trading at the London School of Economics. In fact, he is remembered there as someone who had so many part-time jobs that his fellow students would keep notes for him and help him out with homework when he missed classes. Over the years, he learned the maxim that money and the delusion of wisdom comes from information and that money can buy information.
And if like Soros, you make several fortunes from international dealing, what and where is the best information found? The offices and committee rooms of the United Nations in New York and the World Bank Group in Washington.
Hence, it was no surprise when, early this month, Soros announced that he was bringing into his organization an old friend who had filled a number of posts over the years, through which it was possible to have contributed to the collection of the Soros billions.
The posts involved deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, chief of Cabinet to the U.N. secretary-general and administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. Earlier posts included vice president for External Affairs at the World Bank and the bank’s director of External Affairs. In preparation for these elite appointments was a 10-year stint with an international consulting group that specialized in advice to reformist and socialist candidates for heads of state in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia.
Each and every one of these posts has been held by a good friend of George Soros, Sir Mark Malloch Brown. In 2006, ostensibly for his services to Britain, Sir Brown was made a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George — a KCMG — by the queen of England.
A KCMG in England is awarded only to the most senior of civil servants. They are then called “Sir” rather than “Mr.,” wear fancy, colorful clothing at some state events and become even more impressed with their own self-importance. Thus, the initials of the order are usually known as “Kindly Call Me God” — although never by a recipient.
The son of a South African diplomat, Mark Brown was born and grew up in Zimbabwe (when it was known as Rhodesia), was educated in England at Marlborough College and took a history degree at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
He now lives with his wife, Patricia (”Trish” to George Soros and other friends), who is a vice chairman of Refugees International, and their four children in a five-bedroom house on a near-five-acre estate in Katonah, in upstate New York. The estate belongs to George Soros, who charges Mark $10,000 a month rent, some $5,000 less than a previous tenant.
“Sir” Mark querulously defends this rent by saying that he pays the utilities.
As of now, Brown is “interacting” with Yale University students and faculty at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization as a distinguished visiting fellow. Instead of concentrating on writing a book on globalization, he had been in Washington leading the charge against former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz.
Brown told a large audience at World Bank headquarters that the bank’s “mission” was “hugely at risk” as long as Wolfowitz remained; by his very presence, the British knight also was saying: “Here I am, ethically pure, eminently qualified and ready — right now to become your leader.”
Too bad Brown has a short memory.
Last year, speaking of the United Nations, Mark Malloch Brown insisted, “Not a penny was lost from the organization.” This, after an audit through which it was shown that the United Nations had lost $7 million from overpayments; $61 million was found to have bypassed U.N. rules; $82 million was lost to mismanagement; and $110 million was rated as having “insufficient” justification. This adds up to $260 million out of a $1.6 billion budget.
Naturally, Brown also wants to forget the Oil-for-Food scandals, where he said that his boss at the United Nations, Kofi Annan, had been “fully exonerated.” A totally untrue statement, Brown described calls for Annan’s resignation as “inappropriate political assassination.”
Among many other items in his life, which Brown would prefer no longer to be reminded of, is a speech he made at Pace University in 2005. Speaking of the United States, he said: “This ungainly giant of a nation that has led the world in advancing freedom, democracy and decency cannot quite accept membership in the global neighborhood association; that it must abide by others’ rules as well as its own.” He noted that Washington already has set itself apart in its opposition to the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
It is being said that Sir Mark Malloch Brown, vice chairman to George Soros, will be asked to join the Cabinet of Gordon Brown when he becomes Britain’s next prime minister.
“Sir” Brown may have found another position that will help his partner, “the man who broke the Bank of England,” just when the pound sterling has become interesting again.
Appointed by the Soros Friend G BROWN ..
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/guests/s_508490.html