http://www.mintpressnews.com/biggest-banking-leak-history-details-nefarious-tactics-global-tax-dodgers/201979/
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HEDGING THEIR BETS.
Back when Henry Ford was building his automobile empire, he said
“It is well enough that people do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Almost a century on, fortunately for today’s hedge fund managers, most people still don’t understand banking.
We may not be as badly off as the Greeks or the Spanish, but like us in the UK, they are being punished with austerity for financial misdemeanours they did not commit. The poorer we get, the richer the bankers become, and despite timid governmental attempts to make them behave, we have a big new scandal. Although knowing what it was doing was wrong, HSBC has been helping Britain’s richest evade tax on an unprecedented scale, using offshore accounts in Switzerland. A former employee has been sacked for speaking out after seeing that HSBC was still engaging in huge tax evasion schemes. For those of us ‘hard working tax payers’ who have just had to cough up their self-assessment tax bill by January 31st, or be heavily fined for each overdue day, the immoral privileges of the super-rich make a stark contrast which goes right to the heart of what kind of country we live in.
Much of the austerity the hapless public is suffering was caused by a peculiar branch of banking called the Hedge Fund. A hedge fund is an investment partnership set up by a money manager. It can be a limited company or a limited partnership. So, if the company goes bankrupt, the creditors can't chase investors for more money than they've put into the hedge fund. Hedge fund managers have quite a nice pay arrangement. It’s called the 2 and 20 formula. This ensures hedge fund managers receive 2% of assets and 20% of profits each year. That means that even if they lose money, they are at least guaranteed the 2% return. £1 billion in investments might make the manager £20 million even if the company simply left the money parked in the bank.
On February 9ththe Conservative Party held its annual Black and White Ball in London’s glitzy Grosvenor House to raise £26m to fund their election campaign. One of the stars of the Hedge Fund world, Andrew Law, CEO of Caxton Associates, was there. Of course, whilst David Cameron will welcome whatever donation Law makes, it will be convenient to forget that Caxton is registered in the tax-free haven of Delaware. One of its managers earned £97.1m in 2013. It is estimated that the 500+ guests at the ball are worth collectively over £22 billion. So presumably, there’ll be no nurses, labourers, bus drivers or window cleaners present. They’ll all be too busy struggling to pay their tax bills.
It becomes no exaggeration to say that the rich and corporate elite now ‘own’ what we thought was a democracy. They have built a world run solely for their benefit - the rest of us are merely ants in their golden dung hill. It’s time the people of Britain became angry enough to draw a line and say ‘no more’.