TheDeal.com executive editor Yvette Kantrow writes about how hedge funds have been portrayed positively — and negatively — in the business media recently.
“On the other hand, a recent streak of ethical transgressions by members of this set hasn’t served to correct this, um, negative perception. Take the media lemonade former hedge funders managed to turn into lemons a few weeks ago after The New York Times ran a glowing profile of their new venture, GiveWell, a charity that helps donors evaluate other charities. The Times praises how the pair, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, left lucrative hedge fund jobs to found GiveWell for salaries of $65,000 a year. The Dec. 20 story was heartwarming enough to get picked up by New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog under the headline ‘Hedge-funders use their skills for good, not evil.’ That alone tells you where hedgies rank on the respect scale.
“But the praise may have been premature. A subsequent post on the Intel blog on Jan. 2 — ‘Hedge-funders use their skills for evil, not good’ — reported that Karnofsky had been busted by MetaFilter for setting up an alias and posting positive musings about GiveWell on message boards. Posters to MetaFilter went nuts, noting the irony that an endeavor purporting to bring transparency and honesty to philanthropies was itself engaging in opacity and dishonesty. Karnofsky soon supplied a mea culpa: ‘It was a lapse in judgment. It was terrible. I really hope that you can understand the difference between this mistake and running a scam.’
“OK, nobody ended up dead — this is not ‘L&O.’ But with explanations like that, it’s no wonder hedgies are believable villains. If they’re fibbing online, what else are they up to? Where do they draw the line between ‘mistake’ and ‘scam'”?
Read more here.Â
The Yale Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management announced the appointment of Alan Murray, departing chief…
The Advocate is looking for a savvy reporter to cover the Baton Rouge business scene…
MLex, a LexisNexis company, is an independent news organization for breaking news and forward-looking analysis…
The Austin Business Journal seeks a staff writer to cover economic development in one of…
A Russian court on Saturday placed Sergei Mingazov, a journalist for the Russian edition of…
Justin Nielsen of Investor's Business Daily writes about the newspaper's 40th anniversary. Nielsen writes, "When the…