George Soros has no worries about the global recession. He and a handful of others in the arcane and virtually unregulated world of hedge funds have made a bundle off the global recession.
“I'm having a very good crisis,” Soros says, quoted by the U.K. Daily Mail.
As the Obama administration sets its sets on reining in the industry, Soros and others literally made billions by taking contrarian bets against stocks.
As stocks fell in half, pension funds collapsed and millions of savers watched their 401(k)s founder, Soros made $1.1 billion last year.
“It is, in a way, the culminating point of my life’s work,” Soros told The Australian.
Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine reports that the best-paid hedge fund managers were paid $11.6 billion last year, the third-best year on record, although down sharply from the $22.5 billion in paychecks they cashed in 2007.
Among the top earners (all are estimates):
• James Simons, Renaissance Technologies, $2.5 billion
• John Paulson, Paulson and Co., $2 billion
• John Arnold, Centaurus Energy, $1.5 billion
• George Soros, Soros Fund Management $1.1 billion
Even if you were pretty bad at running a hedge fund it was a good year, the magazine reported. Average take-home pay for the top echelon was $464 million and the average fund CEO packed away $2 million.
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