Would President Hillary Clinton try to scrap the favorable tax treatment for carried interest? She seemed to imply that on her third day as an official presidential candidat — or did she? Clinton appeared to take a swipe at hedge funds and carried interest during a well-choreographed sit-down with Iowa college students open to the media: “There’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80 as I drove here the past few days.” Clinton was alluding to the carried interest rule, which allows hedge fund managers and others who run private partnerships to treat the bulk of their income as long-term capital gains and not ordinary income, which is subject to a higher tax rate. Of course, we’ll see whether she officially calls for the end of this tax benefit when she passes the hat at fundraisers full of hedge funders.
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Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates is planning a major revamping of its Westport, Connecticut corporate campus, according to the Associated Press. The world’s largest hedge fund firm wants to create an underground parking garage, among other things, in what the wire service calls a flood zone. “This is not routine at all. This is a pretty ambitious project,” Alicia Mozian, the town’s conservation director, told the AP.
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The New Jersey Division of Investment reported that its hedge fund portfolio was up 6.85 percent in 2014. While this was roughly half the return of the Standard & Poor’s 500, it was double the performance of the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index, which rose 3.3 percent last year.
