Hedge Funds For Oligarchs

On Tuesday, Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine revealed that the top-earning 25 hedge fund managers in the United States secured another massive payout last year, totaling $11.62 billion.
The hedge fund managers earned an average of $400 million apiece. This meant that they received some $200,000 per hour, assuming that they worked 40 hours per week. On average, they made more than 10,000 times the median household income in the United States.

In Detroit, the city administration is preparing to shut off water service to 28,000 residents in order to force the collection of $42 million in delinquent water bills. A typical member of the top-earning hedge fund managers could have paid this entire amount nine times over from their income this year.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/06/pers-m06.html

What do they do for these princely sums? They mainly manage the money which oligarchs have "earned".

Note that the best and brightest Americans are engaged either in creating new ways of taking your money or in managing the monies which have already been taken.

Update: Here is another similar perspective on hedge funds:

Adair Turner coined a neat phrase for many of the banking industry’s activities during the financial crisis. In a biting critique he opined that they were “socially useless”.

He was right. But it’s not just banking at which his criticism could be aimed. Consider the bastard child of investment banking and asset management: the hedge fund industry. It is a place where a portion of the elite of both have found homes. Multiple homes, in fact, funded by salary packages which make even the dizzying rewards on offer at the height of the big investment banks’ insanity look modest.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/hedge-funds-arent-casino-capitalists-theyre-parasite-capitalists-10230801.html

And frankly, the term "socially useless" applies to most of what the bankgangsters, corporations, and their collaborators in the one percent have been doing. They exist primarily to "create wealth" backed by sovereign debt (that's us, by the way) but which benefits only them.