Wall Street Money Moving From GOP
04/20/07 - 11:59 AM EDT
Brett Arends
Most remarkable: Obama. Unlike the top three, he started with no special network on the Street. Yet in the first three months he came hard on their heels, raising $1.32 million.
Most of these donations come from big investment banks such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs(GS Quote - Cramer on GS - Stock Picks) and UBS. Curiously, big mutual fund companies tend to be less prominent in political donations than the Wall Street investment houses. Alongside Fidelity, the other big players are American Funds and Vanguard. So far, their employees have only given a few thousand dollars, almost all of it to Democrats. One minor exception is Affiliated Managers Group (AMG Quote - Cramer on AMG - Stock Picks) a little-known company based just outside Boston that owns stakes in a variety of mutual fund companies, including Marty Whitman's Third Avenue and Tweedy, Browne. Employees from AMG gave $47,900 to Romney. The inside dish: AMG is closely tied in with the remnants of the Massachusetts Republican Party. The CEO, Sean Healey, is husband of Romney's former lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey. She lost her race to succeed him in November but might be expected to land a posh job in D.C. if he wins the White House. Dodd may be a long-shot presidential candidate, but he has the great advantage of all those hedge funds based in his state. Out of the $4 million he has raised so far, $202,000, or 5%, came from just one source: the legendary Steven Cohen's elite hedge fund SAC Capital.
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