Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

Today, we're going to be talking about hedge funds, inequality, and Wall Street.

My guest is Professor Megan Tobias Neely.

She is assistant professor in the Department of Organization at the Copenhagen Business School.

She is also the author of Hed Out, Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street.

Professor Neely, thank you for talking to me today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, so we will start with the very basics.

We'll start with What's a Hedge Fund?

Which you do discuss in the book as a question that at one point, you yourself even

did not know, people might not know, so we better, we better do it. What's a hedge fund?

Well, and this is something so many people have heard of hedge funds. They constantly make headlines,

but very few people know what they actually do. And it is, I mean, for the purposes of the book,

just of what you need to know is that it's a private investment firm. They're usually

very small. They average about 20 employees that pulls large sums of money from wealthy

investors as well as institutions to invest in the stock market. And the rhetoric often in the general

media is that only the wealthy invest in hedge funds,

but the reality is the majority of their investors are actually institutions. So these are things

like asset managers, investment banks, pension funds, government wealth funds, university

endowments are all invested in hedge funds. So they impact many more of us than we

realize in different ways. Because you have to have a certain amount of money to invest in a hedge

fund, is that right? But the institutions that do this are, like Harvard has even been

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