"Paul Samuelson’s Secret"

From David Warsh:

The last two volumes of Paul Samuelson’s collected papers appeared this month, edited by Janice Murray, his assistant for twenty years. As far as I can tell, the only mention of Commodities Corp. to be found anywhere in the seven volumes appears in the final one, in the last serious piece he ever wrote... Samuelson left his share of loose ends. Reflections on his  role in Commodities Corp. may be among them.

It turns out that the great MIT economist was influential in the creation of one of the earliest and most influential hedge funds. Launched in 1970, Commodities Corp. blazed a trail of extremely high returns throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, before disappearing in various pieces into Bermuda mailboxes and Goldman Sachs. Many of its star traders – Bruce Kovner of Caxton and Paul Tudor Jones, chief among them—formed successful hedge funds of their own. Samuelson thus had a ringside seat at the birth of an influential industry that is still only poorly understood.

About the same time, he invested a substantial amount in shares of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. It was in 1970, too, that he won the Nobel prize in economics, the second to be awarded. Long famous for the fortune that his pioneering textbook earned him after 1948, it turns out that Samuelson may have made more money as an investor than as an author. He was both smarter and richer than is generally understood: as an investor, a bigger winner, perhaps, than the more volatile John Maynard Keynes. ...[read more]...