NYT – The British elections are on Thursday, and members of one constituency, the financiers, have already made their preference extremely clear, Danny Hakim writes in DealBook. Britain’s Conservative-led government has been a staunch supporter of hedge funds and BANKS, battling at home and in the European Union on their behalf, and some hedge fund managers have written “eye-popping checks” to the party. More than $2.3 million came from Michael Hintze, an Australian billionaire who lives in London, where he founded the hedge fund CQS; Michael Farmer, another hedge fund manager, has donated roughly $2.2 million over the same reporting period; and Stanley Fink, who once ran the Man Group and has been party treasurer, has donated $1.3 million since the 2010 election.
The Labour Party, the main opposition party, has called the Conservatives “the political wing of the hedge fund industry.” It wasn’t that long ago that the FINANCIAL industry drew bipartisan support in Britain, which has a global financial center in its capital, but Labour has “tacked left under Ed Miliband, its current leader, in keeping with the politics of inequality” that emerged after the global financial crisis, Mr. Hakim writes. The Labour Party said that out of the roughly $51 million the party took in last year, 27 percent came from labor unions.
