Hugh Hendry Busts Out Tolstoy, TS Eliot, And Buchan To Win An Argument At Hedge Fund Conference

This article is a guest contribution by Courtney Comstock, The Business Insider.

Eclectica's Hugh Hendry and Mike Novogratz, principal of Fortress Investment Group, got into a war of the words yesterday at one of the hedge fund industry's biggest conferences, GAIM.

Hendry is used to fighting (and winning) with professors, who he seems to think are useless as economic commentators.

But according to the GAIM conference's blog, Hendry had to bust out the big boy references to win the prize for the smartest argument against Novogratz and started quoting T.S. Eliot, Buchan and Tolstoy.

He said that he had had to face the twin axis of financial evil that is Germany and France, transporting himself across the European Socialist citadel (we think that's the reference to Tolstoy's War and Peace) to get to our stage.

“The Euro is finished” he concluded. He said gold should be 10% of a fund's assets.

“In the long run, there will be a bail out” he said. “The Euro will go lower and there will be more European political mishaps before they get bailed out.” Novogratz proposed a long Sterling versus the Euro trade.

Novogratz believes that we are on a global mega trend of globalisation with the so-called emerging markets coming to the fore. “That force could carry us through” he said.

But Hendry came out on top adding these two super-smart allusions:

Hendry referenced Buchan's Gap In The Curtain to explain our inability to see into the future or what would happen if we were able to.

“How does life play out?” he asked, and answered himself: “In our haste to make money, we rush to the end.”

And there, we may find, he said, Eliot’s Wilderness of Mirrors, which is a reference to Eliot's poem, Gerontion.

Now watch a really great fight with Hendry against Joe Stiglitz.

Copyright (c) The Business Insider