Meet Mr. Moneybags

Wall Streeter takes home $3B last year, enough to cover budgets of six states.

ByABC News
April 18, 2008, 4:42 PM

April 18, 2008— -- Hedge fund manager John Paulson raked in an astonishing $3 billion last year, a payday that topped all others even in the rarified canyons of Wall Street.

That's more than $1.4 million an hour, assuming a 40-hour workweek with no vacations -- though we expect he worked a lot more than that.

Meanwhile, the average American worker made just $17.86 an hour in March, according to the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It would take 80,756 average Americans to make the same amount of money as Paulson did.

Paulson, who profited with winning bets on securities tied to the mortgage mess, is a poster boy in a world where the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow. The salaries of hedge fund managers like Paulson show just how lopsided the pay scales can be for some at the top.

"They live on a whole different plane, almost a whole different economy," Diane C. Swonk, chief economist of Mesirow Financial, said of titans like Paulson. "There's sort of the ultra, ultra rich, then the rest of economy."

The typical American family made just $48,201 in 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And that median figure includes many householders where there are two adults holding down jobs.

Compare that with the 100 top hedge fund traders around the world, who brought in a combined $30.4 billion, according to trade publication Trader Monthly.

Paulson, founder of Paulson & Co., was king of the hill last year, but there were certainly others who joined him at the top of the income stratosphere.

Phil Falcone, of Harbinger Capital Partners, was estimated to have earned $1.5 billion to $2 billion in 2007, according to Trader Monthly. So did Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies, Steve Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors and Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group.

Swonk called it the "biggest inequality since the Great Depression."

"Not only are the rich getting richer, there are more of them, and those who are rich are getting incredibly rich, sort of a winner-takes-all," she said.