The revolution that Paul Tudor Jones has been preparing for has, it seems, been put on hold indefinitely. Still, Leon Cooperman hedged his bets—literally, as far as he’s concerned.
Billionaire hedge-fund manager Leon Cooperman revealed that he voted for Joe Biden for president even though he expected President Trump to make him richer….
“I voted my values and not my pocketbook,” the Omega Advisors founder told CNBC late Tuesday. “I’ll be richer tomorrow if Trump wins. I’ll probably be poorer tomorrow if Biden wins. But I voted my values.”
This is perhaps not a total surprise, given Coop’s pandemic-induced late-in-life leftward shift and antipathy towards a president who he nonetheless advised on the things the kids use these days. Still, it’s a bit startling coming from a guy who once threw an almighty hissy fit in the direction of President-elect Biden’s old boss and who made his sole blue donation in 2016—a whopping $1,000 of his then-$3.2 billion fortune—to Hillary Clinton so he could yell at her to her face as well as on television. And it does make you wonder exactly which of Joe Biden’s values Cooperman shares. The ones Elizabeth Warren put him up to? The economic ones he helped craft as vice president under Adolf Hitler, er, Barack Obama? I mean, he might see eye-to-eye with Biden on sticking it to those private-equity scoundrels, especially since he says he doesn’t mind higher taxes personally and of course voted for Biden against his economic interests, but surely there’s something more?
Cooperman took issue with Trump’s “interventionist” approach to economic policy. He specifically criticized the pressure Trump put on Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell to set negative interest rates, which the central bank has not done.
“He’s not a capitalist. I call him an interventionist,” Cooperman said. “We came into 2020 with a trillion-dollar budget deficit and a fully employed economy, yet he was trying to gun the economy.”
Umm, I don’t know what Coop’s been reading about Biden’s economic plans, but it certainly doesn’t seem to have been those plans themselves. But Cooperman may have simply been celebrating the evening’s other victories in kind.
I voted for Joe Biden because I voted based on my values, not my pocketbook: Leon Cooperman [CNBC]
Hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman says he voted for Joe Biden [N.Y. Post]