Corporate America has never sat on so much cash. The problem is multi-national corporations have been deploying this cash in ways that create jobs abroad, said hedge fund titan Ken Griffin in rare public comments at the Milken Institute Global Conference being held in Los Angeles this week. The CEO of Citadel, a fund he founded that is now a leader in the of the world of quantitative investing and high frequency trading, touched on inside hedge fund topics not often discussed in public. Ken Griffin, a veracious critic of the US Federal Reserve behind the scenes and not so closet Republican partisan, addressed what many quantitative traders have been predicting to be a major problem: US debt and an economic breakdown.
Ken Griffin waited until the end of his speech to tackle a difficult topic that has been discussed in dulcet tones in underground hedge fund conversations that, to my knowledge, has been active since 2010. Increasingly the conversation is being made public by major hedge fund players, which has been published in ValueWalk.
Warning: this is an adult conversation
Before we proceed, a warning: what you are about to read is not for the timid and could be unsettling to small children.