Today's Washington Post has an article on John Edwards working for the past few years as a consultant to a hedge fund firm, Fortress Investment Group, with $30 billion in assets. According to the Post article, he's "raised $167,460 in donations from Fortress employees for his 2008 presidential campaign, his largest source of support from a single company."
What ever happened to Edward's description of the "Two Americas" - (the very rich + the merely rich) and (the rest of us). Was it just overblown campaign rhetoric? Was his vision of defending the common person only so much hot air? Someone needs to figure this one out soon...
The same Post article also points out direct or indirect ties to the hedge fund industry by other presidential candidates - Hillary Clinton, Rudolph Guiliani, Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama. However, Edwards consultancy with Fortress since 2005 was quite extensive, which ended last year when the company went public. The article states that recently Fortress has stopped the practice of allowing their managing partners use foreign offshore accounts as tax shelters:
John Edwards believes offshore tax shelters are wrong," [Kate] Bedingfield [Edward's campaign spokewoman] said last week. "As president, he will end them. By voluntarily going public, Fortress has ended the practice of using offshore tax shelters for deferred compensation and has committed itself to a whole set of transparency and disclosure obligations that no other hedge fund has committed itself to before."
It appears that as a consultant, Edwards may have contributed to bringing about some degree of honesty and openness to at least one hedge fund company, which belongs to a highly secretive industry as a general rule.