D.E. Shaw's Withdrawal Gate

Bloomberg News has an article about investors annoyed that hedge funds wouldn't let them withdraw their money in the downturn. "Hedge-fund firms including D.E. Shaw & Co. and Harbinger Capital Partners LLC that froze client assets during the financial crisis have yet to pay back a total of about $77 billion to investors, according to estimates by Credit Suisse Tremont Index LLC, which tracks hedge funds," the article says. "D.E. Shaw, the $28 billion investment firm run by David E. Shaw, restricted quarterly redemptions on its two biggest funds in November 2008 even after one of the funds had made money that year and the firm told clients that it had enough cash to meet Dec. 31, 2008, redemptions, according to investors. D.E. Shaw plans to return all money to investors by the end of this month, including $3.4 billion from its Occulus fund, which gained as much as 6.9 percent in 2008 and 10.5 percent last year through October, investors said." What Bloomberg doesn't mention in this article is that while D.E. Shaw's investors had trouble getting their money out, at least one of its employees had no such trouble. That would be the chief of President Obama's National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, who earned $5.2 million a year for his one-day-a-week job at the D.E. Shaw hedge fund. Now D.E. Shaw is trying to get the Obama administration's Securities and Exchange Commission to write short-selling regulations that favor it.