Alternative Market Briefing

Hedge funds - willing culprits or easy scapegoats?

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Beverly Chandler, Opalesque London: Oliver Stone changed the script of his movie "Wall Street 2" from focusing on the Hedge Fund industry to that of Investment Banking says Shane Brett in his latest Global Perspective white paper entitled 'Willing culprits or easy scapegoats?’.

Can this be the best evidence yet that the world is beginning to hate hedge funds less? The blame for the global financial crisis lies squarely at the doors of the banks, Brett says in a tightly written history of the financial crisis and the hedge funds’ role within it. "It was the banks that caused this economic crisis. It was the excesses of the banking industry, through the accelerated growth of debt and lax lending criteria that planted the seeds of global economic collapse" he writes.

Brett opens his piece with a quote from The Sunday Times in 2010, when Kate Walsh wrote: "It was quite convenient to blame the Hedge Funds. They were an easy target, in that they were super-rich, a lot of them were American, and they were presented as bad people. They were blamed for what was happening to our banking system, which in reality was complete rubbish".

For Brett, the seeds of the current problems started to sprout back in 2007 when what he believes was the first really significant event to signal a coming financial storm occurred in the UK on August 9th, when BNP Paribas halted redemptions from three of its He......................

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