Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Money

- Just when you thought there could not be another story about Republican corruption in Ohio, news about a trial comes to light.
Columbus Dispatch:
...When another bureau official questioned a risky hedge fund run by MDL Capital Management that eventually lost $216 million, Terrence W. Gasper warned him to make sure he had his facts straight because MDL was "a friend of the bureau."
.....Lay said he had leveraged only four, five or six times the investment, but McLean insisted it was more like 17 or 18 times, Gasper said. It was McLean who told The Dispatch in 2005 that Gasper had called MDL "a friend of the bureau" when McLean raised questions about it.....
....White was helping market the MDL investment, and Gasper said White's assurance was one of the reasons he agreed in May 2004 to pump an additional $100 million into the hedge fund even though it had lost millions of dollars.....

Under the administration of Republican Governor Bob Taft , money belonging to the Ohio Bureau of Worker's Compensation was played with as though it were money from the board game Monopoly. Hundreds of millions of dollars were at risk because the GOP appointees were trying to help their "friends" instead of the disabled workers of Ohio.

- > Which Presidential candidate raised the most money on Wall Street in the last quarter?
Bloomberg has the answer:
Hillary Clinton raised more money on Wall Street last quarter than Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney combined.

Clinton beat Democratic presidential rival Obama in donations from employees of the top 10 underwriters of U.S. stock offerings, a reversal from previous quarters. The New York senator brought in $748,896 from the firms in July through September, compared with $177,456 for Obama, an Illinois senator....

.... Clinton's lead in public opinion polls and disciplined campaign is persuading Wall Street to invest in her, said Rogan Kersh, associate dean of New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. ``The reason they call it the smart money is because in the end they bet on the horse that wins,'' Kersh said....