So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!

I was reminded of that quote from Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I read this article in the UK’s Guardian.  Yes, I’m an anglophile and delight in all things British from Willy S down to Monty Python.  A similar goodbye came from a 37 year old retiring hedge fund manager.  If you ever needed a really good clue to the issues underlying the Financial Crisis as well as what’s really wrong with our government, Andrew Lahde’s retirement tome is a good place to start.

The boss of a successful US hedge fund has quit the industry with an extraordinary farewell letter dismissing his rivals as over-privileged “idiots” and thanking “stupid” traders for making him rich.

Well, that was succinct enough, wasn’t it?   Andrew Lahde’s $80m Los Angeles-based firm Lahde Capital Management in Los Angeles made it huge by betting against subprime mortgages.  One of his funds returned 866% last year by taking up the position that the US home loans industry would collapse.  Lucky you if you got in on his ground floor.   Not content with just going quietly into the night, Lahde added this zinger to his retirement speech.

“The low-hanging fruit, ie idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking,” he wrote. “These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government,” he said.

“All of this behaviour supporting the aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.”

Indeed.  Do we really need yet another Harvard man at the helm?

Full text of the letter.