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| Protestors hold shields to protect themselves form tear gas at a weekly demonstration against the wall in the West Bank village of Bilin. One week earlier, Bilin resident Bassem Abu Rahme was murdered by an Israeli soldier during the protest, 24 April. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills) |
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| Palestinian students at Bethlehem University take part in a performance of a traditional Palestinian wedding in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, 23 April. (Haytham Othman/MaanImages) |
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| Gerry Adams, Northern Ireland political leader and Sinn Fein President, on a visit to areas destroyed by the recent Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, 8 April. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages) |
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| Palestinian girls attend the opening of a photo exhibition entitled "Who am I? Palestine through Palestinian eyes" in the Aida refugee camp in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, 10 April. (Mimmi Nietula/MaanImages) |
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| Israeli soldiers detain Palestinian youths during an invasion into the West Bank village of Beit Omar near Hebron, 2 April. (Mamoun Wazwaz/MaanImages) |
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| Palestinians enact a scene in which Israeli soldiers abuse Palestinian detainees during a demonstration held in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on Palestinian Prisoner Day, 17 April. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages) |
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| Palestinian Authority forces participate in a training session in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, 14 April. (Haytham Othman/MaanImages) Palestinian children take part in a celebration of Jerusalem as the capital of Arab Culture 2009 in the West Bank city of Qalqiliya, 19 April. (Khaleel Reash/MaanImages) |
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| Israeli soldiers stand guard as a bulldozer clears the ground next to the Israeli settlement Carmel, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, 26 April (Mamoun Wazwaz/MaanImages) Palestinian calligrapher Yasser Abu Sayma shows his work at his office in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, 23 April. Abu Sayma will present Pope Benedict XVI a handwritten copy of the Gospel of Luke as a gift during the pope's visit to Bethlehem in May. (Haytham Othman/MaanImages) |
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">Clifford S. Asness is not afraid to defend himself against attacks from the Obama administration. The outspoken managing partner of AQR Capital Management, a $20 billion hedge fund in Greenwich, Conn., has written a scathing letter striking back at President Obama for his harsh words blaming hedge funds for Chrysler’s bankruptcy.</span>
ReplyDelete<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">The letter is making its way around Wall Street, where it’s being met with cheers from other hedge funds managers, one of whom sent it to DealBook. Among other things, Mr. Asness said he was “aghast at the president’s comments” and called them “backwards and libelous.”</span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Read the full text of the letter after the jump. </span></span>
<span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Unafraid In <span>Greenwich Connecticut</span></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">Clifford S. Asness
Managing and Founding Principal
AQR Capital Management, LLC</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">The President has just harshly castigated hedge fund managers for being unwilling to take his administration’s bid for their Chrysler bonds. He called them “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">The responses of hedge fund managers have been, appropriately, outrage, but generally have been anonymous for fear of going on the record against a powerful President (an exception, though still in the form of a “group letter,” was the superb note from “The Committee of Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders,” some of the points of which I echo here, and a relatively few firms, like Oppenheimer, that have publicly defended themselves). Furthermore, one by one the managers and banks are said to be caving to the President’s wishes out of justifiable fear.</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">I run an approximately twenty billion dollar money management firm that offers hedge funds as well as public mutual funds and unhedged traditional investments. My company is not involved in the Chrysler situation, but I am still aghast at the President’s comments (of course, these are my own views, not those of my company). Furthermore, for some reason I was not born with the common sense to keep it to myself, though my title should more accurately be called “Not Afraid Enough” as I am indeed fearful writing this… It’s really a bad idea to speak out. </span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">Angering the President is a mistake, and my views will annoy half my clients. I hope my clients will understand that I’m entitled to my voice and to speak it loudly, just as they are in this great country. I hope they will also like that I do not think I have the right to intentionally “sacrifice” their money without their permission.</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">Here’s a shock. When hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds, and individuals, including very sweet grandmothers, lend their money they expect to get it back. However, they know, or should know, they take the risk of not being paid back. But if such a bad event happens, it usually does not result in a complete loss. A firm in bankruptcy still has assets. It’s not always a pretty process. Bankruptcy court is about figuring out how to most fairly divvy up the remaining assets based on who is owed what and whose contracts come first. </span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">The process already has built-in partial protections for employees and pensions, and can set lenders’ contracts aside in order to help the company survive, all of which are the rules of the game lenders know before they lend. But, without this recovery process nobody would lend to risky borrowers. Essentially, lenders accept less than shareholders (means bonds return less than stocks) in good times only because they get more than shareholders in bad times.</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">The above is how it works in America, or how it’s supposed to work. The President and his team sought to avoid having Chrysler go through this process, proposing their own plan for re-organizing the company and partially paying off Chrysler’s creditors. Some bond holders thought this plan unfair. Specifically, they thought it unfairly favored the United Auto Workers, and unfairly paid bondholders less than they would get in bankruptcy court. So, they said no to the plan and decided, as is their right, to take their chances in the bankruptcy process. But, as his quotes above show, the President thought they were being unpatriotic or worse.</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">Let’s be clear, it is the job and obligation of all investment managers, including hedge fund managers, to get their clients the most return they can. They are allowed to be charitable with their own money, and many are spectacularly so, but if they give away their clients’ money to share in the “sacrifice”, they are stealing. Clients of hedge funds include, among others, pension funds of all kinds of workers, unionized and not. </span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">The managers have a fiduciary obligation to look after their clients’ money as best they can, not to support the President, nor to oppose him, nor otherwise advance their personal political views. That’s how the system works. If you hired an investment professional and he could preserve more of your money in a financial disaster, but instead he decided to spend it on the UAW so you could “share in the sacrifice”, you would not be happy.</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">Let’s quickly review a few side issues.</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">The President’s attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it to a labor union that delivers money and votes for him. Why is he not calling on his party to “sacrifice” some campaign contributions, and votes, for the greater good? Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and abuse of power.</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">Let’s also mention only in passing the irony of this same President begging hedge funds to borrow more to purchase other troubled securities. That he expects them to do so when he has already shown what happens if they ask for their money to be repaid fairly would be amusing if not so dangerous. That hedge funds might not participate in these programs because of fear of getting sucked into some toxic demagoguery that ends in arbitrary punishment for trying to work with the Treasury is distressing. Some useful programs, like those designed to help finance consumer loans, won’t work because of this irresponsible hectoring.</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">Last but not least, the President screaming that the hedge funds are looking for an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout is the big lie writ large. Find me a hedge fund that has been bailed out. Find me a hedge fund, even a failed one, that has asked for one. In fact, it was only because hedge funds have not taken government funds that they could stand up to this bullying. </span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">The TARP recipients had no choice but to go along. The hedge funds were singled out only because they are unpopular, not because they behaved any differently from any other ethical manager of other people’s money. The President’s comments here are backwards and libelous. Yet, somehow I don’t think the hedge funds will be following ACORN’s lead and trucking in a bunch of paid professional protesters soon. Hedge funds really need a community organizer.</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">This is America. We have a free enterprise system that has worked spectacularly for us for two hundred plus years. When it fails it fixes itself. Most importantly, it is not an owned lackey of the oval office to be scolded for disobedience by the President.</span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: Times New Roman;">I am ready for my “personalized” tax rate now. </span>
While all this Zionist violence is unleashed without respite or pause, let's read please these words uttered by a TRUE MAN OF PEACE in Cambridge just a few days ago:
ReplyDelete<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Audience member</span><span>: “Can you give us an example of a leader we should look up to as a positive influence?”</span>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span> </span>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Dalai Lama</span><span> (after thinking for a few seconds): “President Bush. I met him personally and liked him very much. He was honest and straightforward, and that is very important. I may not have agreed with all his policies, but I thought he was very honest and a very good leader.”</span>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
http://www.sabinabecker.com/
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A link would have done the trick fleming. I mean, the whole chunk is just....
ReplyDelete.
didnt have a link; I received the entire thing within the body of forwarded email
ReplyDeleteand what does that tell you fleming?
ReplyDeleteI dont know V what does it tell you? Google AQR, go to their website and look the author up. The guy exists, the firm exists, what kind of crazy conspiracy are you going to suggest?
ReplyDeleteI got two enmails of the same letter today. Its quite the hit in "my community".
Is this some kind of a sick Joke, or what? I don't believe it! A war criminal wanted for more than 200 war crimes, including starting a war of aggression, the supreme crime against humanity, a liar who deliberately lied to the world and his people more than 900 times, is "very honest and a very good leader.” Fuck you dalai lama you stupid son of a bitch!
ReplyDelete<p style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-size: small; font-family: Calibri;">Bush and Co. Lied More Than 900 Times In Run-Up To War</span></span>
ReplyDelete<p style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/23/bush-and-co-lied-more-th_n_82810.html</span>
“269 war crimes! We have to go back to mid-twentieth century to find something similar. Shame on that president and his regime, shame on the media conspiracy of silence that gave us bits and pieces but not the whole picture, and enormous gratitude to Professor Haas for doing that overdue job! Next steps: a truth commission to get at the bottom of the rot in the "leader of the free world" and a world tribunal to draw the consequences.”–Johan Galtung, Professor of Peace Studies Recipient of the Right Livelihood Award
ReplyDelete<span>http://www.amazon.com/George-Bush-War-Criminal-Administrations/dp/0313364990</span>
A fraud was perpetrated on the entire world. A weak and defenceless nation was attacked, invaded and occupied by the greatest superpower in history on a pretext that is a transparent deception, a lie. This should bother someone.
ReplyDeleteIraq was weak and defenseless? I thought Iraq had the fourth largest armed services in the world prior to US invasion? I thought Iraq beat back mighty Iran in the 80s? I thought Iraq righteously crushed Kuwait for daring to stand up to it in the 90s? I thought Bagdhad Bob said americans would die by the thousands if we dared attack the mighty lions of the Republican Guard?
ReplyDeleteWhich is it RS? One day you are boasting of the toughness and invincibility of "the resistance", the next you are calling the Iraqi military weak and defenseless???? One day you are talking about the imminent and inevitable collapse of the american "empire" and its military, the next you are calling it the "greatest superpower in history"?
Can you see why some might be confused?
"Saddam does not control the northern part of his country... We aim to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt." Condoleeza Rice, July 15, 2001
ReplyDelete"He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to use conventional power against his neighbors...The US policy of containment has effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator." Colin Powell, February 24, 2001
" He has not been able to build his military backup, or to develop weapons of mass destruction for the last ten years...America has been successful in keeping him in a box." Colin Powell, May 15, 2001
It is impossible to reconcile these statements by two of the administration's most senior officials with those made by Bush and others - including Powel and Rice themselves - in the month leading up to the invasion. Powell even produced a document before the UN purporting to prove that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium ore from Niger, but the document turned out to be a forgery. The failure to locate any WMD is irrelevant, therefore, since the US government clearly knew there were no such weapons to begin with.
That the rationale for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people should turn out to be nothing but incompetent lying must also surely bother someone other than me.
You assume the worst rs. There are plenty of others it "bothers". But the FACT is, Bush had no reason to knowingly lie about Iraq. Certainly he knew the intelligence reports could have been wrong regarding Saddam's WMDs. However, he also knew we had just been attacked beyond our wildest dreams by people bent on our ANNIHILATION. Given his role as CIC, so soon after 9/11, he COULD NOT TAKE THE RISK. HE COULD NOT TAKE THE RISK THAT THE ANNIHILATION OF THE US WOULD HAVE BEEN ON HIM. Get it?
ReplyDelete*Shaking my head in disbelief*
ReplyDeleteAnd this is coming from a guy who's supposed to be able to read!! What could it sound like coming from those who aren't?!
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