Friday, May 9, 2014

Fact Of The Day

By Jeff Simpson

Alpha magazine is out with its annual "rich list" detailing the successes of the highest earning hedge fund managers in America. The news once again is that it's good to be a successful hedge fund manager: the top 25 earned a collective $21.1 billion this year.

Even within that group there's considerable inequality. The top earner, David Tepper, took home $3.5 billion which is about five times as much as either of the two men tied for the tenth slot.

How does that look in context? Well, it's about 0.13 percent of total national income for 2013 being earned by something like 0.00000008 percent of the American population. Another way of looking at it is that this is about 2.5 times the income of every kindergarten teacher in the country combined.
 


Oligarchy

Move along, nothing to see here! 

3 comments:

  1. What's really incredible is Tepper's fund (like many) is charging "2 and 20", or 2 percent on assets and 20 percent of the profits. Yet hedge funds haven't beat the the stock market for five years. I guess it's all about the tax treatment, but wow. And it's not just rich rubes getting fleeced but pension funds and endowments invest with hedge funds too. And it's all going to an industry that makes nothing, builds nothing, creates nothing and takes nearly everything.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Amen, 5:29

    The sooner we move away from this casino economy, the better for all in this country. We used to produce goods & services, now it's mostly services, with the goods production going elsewhere.
    And why is there such a class struggle going on?
    Why is there such a huge dichotomy between the 99 and 1 per cent?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Why is there such a huge dichotomy? I think you answered your own question in the first paragraph.

      Delete