Most anti-war Democratic Party voters don't think Wall Street speculators should be able to enrich themselves by profiteering from offshore hedge funds, from investments in weapons manufacturing firms, from endless U.S. wars abroad or from apparently violating Securities and Exchange Commission regulations and engaging in stock manipulation. Yet in his 2013 book Street Smarts, the former business partner of Billionaire Speculator/"Philanthropist" and 2016 Clinton presidential campaign contributor George Soros, a Wall Street speculator named Jim Rogers, wrote the following:
"...There were only two firms on Wall Street, small companies, that specialized in foreign investing, and Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder was one of them...I was hired at Bleichroeder to work with a vice president of the firm...Soros had grown up in Hungary, lived in the United Kingdom until his mid-twenties...We were managing a fund at Bleichroeder, the Double Eagle hedge fund...when due to...a new regulatory restriction, we were forced to split from the firm and go out on our own. Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder would remain our primary broker.
"We got a little office and created the Quantum Fund...a...offshore hedge fund for foreign investors--who were not subject to the interest equalization tax--incorporated in the Netherlands Antilles...
"...I jumped on a plane [in the 1970's] and started visiting defense contractors around the country. Lockheed...was famous for its Advanced Development Projects division, better known as the Skunk Works, located in California, where its engineers came up with sophisticated weaponry for the Pentagon. I investigated Lockheed and other companies, like Northrop. I flew to Washington and learned that even the doves in Congress--Democratic Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin being one of those to whom I talked--were in favor of Pentagon spending on advanced electronic warfare...Defense stocks at the time were depressed--selling for a dollar, two dollars, some of them...We started buying a lot of those stocks...
"...Lockheed went up a hundred times over the next few years...In 1980...the Quantum protfolio was up 4,200 percent...
"By 1979...the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] investigated us over our investment in a company called Computer Sciences Corporation. The SEC claimed that my partner, George Soros, was engaged in stock manipulation. He was charged with selling the stock short, only to cover his short sales by buying shares back at a lower price on the upcoming public offering. He was given the opportunity to sign a consent decree, in which he and the firm...promised not to do it again. Why should we agree to sign it? I asked him...Why let it be construed that we were manipulating the stock? I was taken aback by his answer--`Because that is what I was doing,' he said."
No comments:
Post a Comment