As Asian consumers were saving and US consumers were spending, and the current accounts got all imbalanced, and also the capital accounts (as they must do if the current account is imbalanced), what were the US investing in with all that foreign capital?

There are many ways of looking at a situation, and how we look at a situation provides us with particular insights into specific aspects of a situation. Take the current credit crisis. We could look at it from the point of view of the financial markets, the banking industry, the real economy, and so on.

This is the first of a series of Strategy Spotlights which will describe as simply as possible, certain popular hedge fund strategies. The content will be amended and added to from time to time and eventually the whole series will be uploaded to a perpetual part of this site as a reference guide.    

Hedge funds have been accused of charging extortionate fees. The typical hedge fund charges what they call 2 and 20 fees by which is meant that there is a 2% management fee charged on the total assets managed and a 20% performance fee in the form of a share of profits.  The management fee is

  An excruciating year for investing:   2008 was an appalling year for investors. Amid the turmoil particularly in the 3rdquarter, hedge funds came under intense attack from government, media, the public, often from their own investors and even from their own prime brokers. Most of these attacks took the form of vitriolic rhetoric, threat of