Gilt Trip: Hedge fundies start worrying about their wealth

Gilt Trip

Everyone else already hates them. Now even hedge-funders are starting to feel bad about their wealth.

Condé Nast Portfolio
December 2007 issue

By Daniel Roth

In late August, Jeff Tarrant was driving home from his midtown Manhattan office when he heard a radio report on a topic that he knew intimately: the subprime meltdown. The founder of Protégé Partners, a fund of hedge funds, Tarrant had had a good year betting that the mortgage mess would continue and was following the story closely. Still, he was taken aback when a young investor interviewed on the segment suggested that the crisis should be contained by regulating hedge funds. "I'm sitting back and thinking, 'Subprime had nothing to do with hedge funds,'  " Tarrant recalls. "It was rating agencies. The funny thing is, here's a kid on the street. He probably had $10,000 in his I.R.A., and he's blaming the hedge funds! How did that happen?"

Hmm, how did the average investor come to be suspicious of secretive, ultrawealthy money movers?