Buried in this article from those arch fiend capitalists at Forbes:

Your Pain, Their Gain

Peter J. Schwartz 05.05.08
Crumbling home prices and $100 oil helped Wall Street’s Highest Earners pull in $19 billion last year

Problems paying the mortgage, filling the gas tank and feeding the family have eroded living standards for millions of Americans during the past several months. Not so for people who manage big piles of money–many of them made a fortune betting correctly on the housing debacle and rising commodity prices last year.
Our second annual look at the pay of folks who run hedge and private equity funds shows that the top 20 took home a collective $18.7 billion last year, 43% more than in 2006. To even make the list you needed minimum earnings of $350 million, which is $90 million higher than the year before. No chief executive of a traditional Wall Street investment bank even came close…
For hedge fund billionaires Pickens and second-ranked George Soros ($2.4 billion), whose own investments compose a significant portion of their funds, there’s more to be made from asset appreciation than from fees. Soros made $2 billion from the growth of personal investments within his $17 billion Quantum Endowment Fund, which returned 32% for the year…

Gee, a suspicious person might even wonder if Mr. Soros hasn’t had something to do with both the collapse of the housing market and the spectacular rise of the cost of oil.
Where are the Congressional investigations?
Or is it all right to make billions (with a b) a year off of the back of the suffering poor as long as you are the Democrat’s top money man?And in case this was not enough irony for your daily minimum requirement, we also have this article from Thomson Financial News:

Soros urges regulation for hedge funds

04.17.08

BRUSSELS (Thomson Financial) - Hedge fund pioneer George Soros called on Thursday for regulation of such highly speculative investment vehicles and the banks that lend to them.
‘I think that hedge funds need to be regulated like all other market participants,’ Soros told a conference in Brussels, where he was promoting his most recent book.
The Hungarian-born billionaire financier said that hedge funds would be best regulated through the banking system by requiring banks that lend to them to hold greater reserves…
Hedge funds leverage capital provided by wealthy and institutional investors with borrowed money, which they use to make often highly risky and complex trades.
They are currently largely unregulated despite growing calls for action from authorities.
Although the current crisis in the financial sector originated largely in the banks — the regulated part of the market — hedge funds have faced intense scrutiny recently because of their huge leverage…While global financial markets were witnessing the bursting of what Soros called a ’super bubble’ …

Of course Mr. Soros has done more than his part to talk the economy down.And now that he will soon have his minions back in power, he is all for regulating those evil hedge funds.
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