‘Sexist mores of super-rich hurt us all,’ sobs an American female columnist in the New York Times. I don’t usually follow this kind of drivel — the sexist stuff, I mean — but a familiar name caught my bloodshot eye, so I read further. Apparently the sexist mores of the super-rich were exposed by the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, a man who once approached me in the GreenGo nightclub in Gstaad and said to me that I could do worse than invest with him. Paul was polite, a southern gentleman, and was as different from the average fund manager soliciting funds than I am from, say, Anthony Weiner. (He is the pervert who, as a congressman from New York, sent pictures of his private parts to hundreds of women, got caught, denied they were his, eventually admitted that they were, resigned from Congress, and is now running for mayor of New York and is leading the field.)
Paul Tudor Jones became the number one performer during the go-go years, and played it by the book. There was never a whiff of scandal or greed about him or his business, no Steve Cohen he, but now he’s had to cave in, apologise and eat humble pie because the hairy feminists are after him. Here’s what he said in a speech at the University of Virginia, my alma mater: ‘You will never see as many great women investors or traders as men — end of story. As soon as that baby’s lips touch the mother’s bosom, forget it. Every single investment idea, every desire to understand what is going to make this go up or down is going to be overwhelmed by the most beautiful experience which a man will never share — a mode of connection between that mother and that baby.’
I can’t think of truer or more beautiful and tender words, yet the ghastly Washington Post reported it and the usual sob sisters are up in arms. Paul, to his eternal disgrace, apologised. Apologised for what? I suppose one needs to apologise for the truth these days, and seek counselling when caught red-handed committing a crime, but this is ridiculous. Motherhood may be a downer when it comes to becoming a master of the universe, but isn’t it normal? Most mothers I know prefer their children to the stock ticker, whereas men choose the latter. And something else the hairy contingent doesn’t know, among myriad things, that is. About 15 years after our first meeting, my friend Charles Fix and I visited Paul’s offices in the Big Bagel. He was playing with his infant son on all fours and, although very polite, he was concentrating on the baby, not Fix, who was asking for precise details. On our way down Charles, with whom I invested, told me he was getting out. ‘His priorities have changed,’ was the way he put it.
Another 20 years later, Paul has to eat humble pie for saying something he knew to be true having gone through it himself. The hairy ones attacked him for amassing a great fortune while ‘four out of ten families with children under the age of 18 are now headed by women who are the primary bread winners’. So what does this have to do with Tudor Jones? It’s like him saying that, although he could afford ten, 100, 1,000 nannies, he preferred to take care of his baby himself. Women have choices and they decide for themselves. They don’t need the ugly brigade to tilt at windmills. All he said is that once a mother holds the baby in her arms, the ticker tape is a bad memory.
Basically, the backlash against Paul is income inequality. The very, very top is comprised mostly of men and, although I can’t prove it, I know that more than half of the great hedge-fund fortunes were built on insider trading, no ifs or buts about it. It just so happened that the hysterical ones picked on by far the most honest and decent person in Wall Street. Typical? Absolutely. And on the subject of hysterics, I read in the Daily Telegraph that an Israeli official has accused the British Foreign Office of anti-Semitism. I thought that was stop-the-press kind of news. Israel accusing people of anti-Semitism is unheard of. After the murder of Count Bernadotte in Jerusalem by the Stern Gang, Yitzhak Shamir to be exact, a Swedish newspaper denounced the killing in a very moderate tone, and was compared to Himmler by the usual suspects. Now the Israelis are screaming anti-Semitism because they continue to build houses on lands that don’t belong to them, and are actually ethnically cleansing parts of the West Bank — hence the crying wolf first.
William Hague, who obviously suffers from sunstroke (from a sunbed, not that English orange thing no one has seen in months) and wants to send arms to radical Islamists in Syria, has bent over backwards to sign scientific co-operation agreements with Israel. He should put lots of ice on his head, not go on sunbeds, publicly eat his words against the last secular leader in the Middle East, Assad, and tell the Israelis that, if they continue to accuse his office of anti-Semitism, they might get what they’ve been whining about these past 65 years. As Paul Tudor Jones said, ‘End of story.’
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