Clinton Family Affair

Hedge funds have officially become a Clinton family staple now that Chelsea got hired by a multi billion-dollar company, her father Bill earns millions as an “advisor” to his billionaire friend’s hedge fund and her mother Hillary gets lots of campaign cash from the entire industry.

In fact, the owners of the company (Avenue Capital Group) that just hired Chelsea have contributed thousands of dollars to Hillary’s campaigns as well as other Democratic lawmakers. Federal records show that Marc Larsy and his wife Sonia Gardner have donated a lot of money to Al Gore, John Kerry and the maximum allowed under law to Hillary’s Senate campaigns.

Could hiring the Senator’s daughter, a philosophy major with no financial experience, be a method of contributing to the 2008 presidential candidate? After all, Chelsea is only 26 and has had only one other job as a vague “consultant ” to an international consulting firm called McKinsey & Co. She is hardly qualified to earn six figures at a huge fund that manages about $12 billion in assets.

This is why one longtime Clinton supporter, who even worked on Bill’s presidential campaign, points out that this looks like a white collar welfare or fundraising program for both Hillary and Chelsea, perhaps a way to contribute beyond federally mandated limits.

Ironically, it was only a few months ago that Hillary blasted young people for not wanting to work hard and expecting everything to be handed to them on a silver platter. At a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Convention, the New York Senator said that kids, for whatever reason, think they’re entitled to go right to the top with $50,000 or $75,000 jobs when they have not done anything to earn their way up.

Certainly, Chelsea will earn a lot more than that thanks to her silver platter. No one will comment officially on the former first daughter’s salary, but industry insiders believe it will be at least several hundred thousand dollars. Hedge fund jobs are lucrative and hard to get. The controversial and lightly regulated private funds pool the money of wealthy and well-connected investors and are constantly battling to maintain freedom from the government scrutiny that other money managers receive.