NEW YORK. As his plane touched down at LaGuardia Airport here, Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis looked out his window and couldn’t help but laugh. “It is as your distinguished Vice President Biden says,” he says by way of excuse to this reporter. “It is a third-world airport, and I almost said fourth-world.”
LaGuardia: “C’mon, man–we’re at least second world!”
That touch of scorn may reflect Varoufakis’s insecurity in the face of the task that looms before him: tough, one-on-one meetings with managers of so-called “hedge funds” here and in Greenwich, Connecticut, in which he will demand the return of names lifted from Greek myths, or else the payment of royalties for their use.
“These men, they think they are gods,” Varoufakis says as he waits for his suitcase to emerge onto the luggage carousel. “But we Greeks had many gods where you monotheists could only afford one.”
Cerberus: “You want your money back? Bwa-ha-ha!”
Varoufakis is referring to the practice among hedge fund managers of using names from Greek mythology such as Cerberus, Kynikos, Ikos and Argonaut to rub a patina of high culture on their rapacious enterprises, as well as attract investments from graduates of expensive private colleges who are more comfortable thinking about subjects from their liberal arts educations than big numbers. “You take a guy who majored in the humanities,” says Edward “Ted” Rensmore of Apollo Capital Advisors Fund II, L.P. “He knows who Damon and Pythias are, but he hasn’t balanced his checkbook since Jerry Garcia died.”
Hedge funds are investment vehicles that attract money from rich people who can afford to lose it if the risky strategies they pursue don’t pan out. The managers of such funds are paid ginormous amounts of money whether or not investors receive their hoped-for gains, so everything’s cool.
“Don’t you dare name your highly-leveraged baseball card fund Aphrodite–that’s my mother’s name!”
Hedge fund managers say they are only following the three rules of capitalism in making their highly-leveraged bets that sometimes rattle markets in asset classes as different as small-cap stocks, emerging market equities and baseball cards. When asked to elucidate those principles, Rensmore says “Take somebody else’s money, invest it and make a profit, and keep both.”
Wow. Best definition of hedge funds and how they operate I’ve ever read on a humor site. The combo of bankruptcy attorney and humorist is just unbeatable.