So, now I got another clue about the plot to take down Rajat Gupta. He’s a big Obama donor.
I was wondering about it. After all, Goldman was a big Democrat donor. So, of course, was Raj Rajaratnam.
So I dug around and I found that Daniel Loeb, of Third Point LLC, a firm implicated in naked short-selling with Goldman (taking down firms like Lehman, and also Overstock) doesn’t like Obama at all:
EXHIBIT A – DANIEL LOEB LETTER TO OBAMA, DATED JULY 24, 2011.
“The budget is not the only thing in deficit today, as a paucity of leadership has left the country without a stable framework in which businesses can conduct business, investors can invest and consumers can consume without a high degree of uncertainty and fear,” the letter begins.
While Mr. Loeb concluded last year by saying he would no longer be writing Third Point’s quarterly investor letters, his apparent dissatisfaction with President Obama has roused him to once again pick up his pen for another blunt and acerbic piece.”
From the letter:
“It is increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that while Washington burns, President Obama is fiddling away by insisting that the only solution to the nation’s problems — whether unemployment, the debt ceiling or deficit reductions — lies in redistribution of wealth. Perhaps a plan that led the way forward by expanding opportunities rather than redistributing outcomes and emphasized growth and prosperity for all would be met with less political resistance.”
July, when this letter went out, would be just after the May conviction of Galleon, and the meme circulating about the “envy of the richer” which focuses attention on the millionaire manager crowd.
The summer of 2011 was also when the OccupyWallStreet movement started to be hatch. Occupy has been seen by some, including me, as an Obama re-election strategy.
I do sympathize with some of OWS’s goals and concerns, however, and I think its support for financial reform is correct. I daresay, the hedge-fund industry doesn’t think so.
The OWS crowd is a big critic of Goldman Sachs and the hedge-fund industry and a supporter both of financial reform and of Elizabeth Warren, who has proposed regulation of the hedge-fund industry and the Tobin tax (on trading) as well. She – and OWS – have thus become a No. 1 target of the hedge-fund crowd.
So has Obama, in so far as he pursues socialist policies that might attack hedge-funds.
Loeb has a history of colluding with the banks and engaging in naked short-selling to destroy companies.
[Mark Schwartz who founded the New Silk Road fund that Gupta joined, left to manage money for Soros. He’s now returned to Goldman.]
Gupta was supposed to have left Goldman too. If he had, he’d have missed being taken down. He stayed to please Blankfein and got caught up in one of the biggest trading cases in US history.
Other questions. Why was Rajaratnam caught on tape agreeing to protect Henry King, another tipster?
Protect him for whom?
Who were the other funds that David Loeb was leaking to?
Was it simply coincidental that Gupta lost his investment in the Galleon fund because it was taken down in the collapse of Lehman in 2008. Remember, Lehman was the target of collusive action between the hedgies and Goldman Sachs. That’s what’s emerged in the Overstock lawsuit.
Too many coincidences for comfort…