NEWS & POLITICS ARCHIVES

Mitt Loves N.Y.: Sean Fieler

by

With Mitt Romney as its de facto candidate, the roster of Restore Our Future, Romney’s designated Super PAC slush fund, reads like a laundry list of New York City’s wealthiest denizens. And, according to the Center for Responsive Politics and contrary to popular belief, Super PAC’s are receiving a huge majority of their donations from these single individuals rather then enormous corporations.
 
So, here at the Voice, we’re going to tell you a little bit about our neighbors, one donor at a time:
 
As Mitt returns from what many pundits from across the ideological spectrum have dubbed an epic fail of an abroad trip to London and Israel, we settle back in our profiling seats and dig further into the SEC filings of Restore Our Future.
While we’ve been gone, the SuperPAC released an ad touting the Presidential candidate’s ‘superb’ handling of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002. And, while they’re busy with all that jazz, we’ve been looking into our next subject, Mr. Sean Fieler.

Like a handful of ‘Mitt Loves N.Y.’ targets, Fieler’s career demonstrates an interesting mash-up of wealth and traditional values. However, he stands apart from the rest with a thought pattern that shows flairs of Ron Paul and Chick-fil-A. As the Chairman of the hedge-fund titan Equinox Partners LP, Fieler has found himself on the fringe of the ‘investor-intellect’ label.

Although he is a native of Princeton, New Jersey, on the SuperPAC’s filing this past July, Fieler is listed as a ‘Financial Analyst’ at Equinox Partners with an office up all the way on the 27th floor of the Swiss Bank Tower on Fifth Avenue. In addition to this flashy one-time donation of $50,000, Fieler has given the gift that keeps on giving to numerous other Republican causes, including the New York Republican Federal Campaign Committee and the RNC. But, besides the donation to Restore Our Future, these facts are sort of irrelevant in regards to the Bigger Picture.

Fieler joined Equinox Partners LP in the mid-90s, when the hedge-fund boom was rapidly consuming Corporate America. In 2001, he was named a managing member – a title he still holds today. To understand just a sliver of the mentality America held in the early 2000s, at the onset of the War on Terror and a decade of faux prosperity, it was reported in 2002 that Equinox was planning to open its first offshore fund in Bermuda to boost profits. This was long before offshore became synonymous in our national discussion with tax evasion and greed.

Soon enough, with the help of his partner, William Strong, Fieler was reaping a 13.3% compounded return for Equinox by observing global businesses and successfully buying securities at a superb discount. While we understand that this is all Wall Street talk, the only thing you need to know is that a 13.3% compounded return, in the hedge-fund universe, translates into three cherries on the corporate slot machine. But let us return to what we mentioned briefly in the opening paragraphs: the Ron Paul and Chick-fil-A comparisons.

What connects Fieler to the Texas Congressman and libertarian soothsayer? As an advisor to The Gold Standard Now, Fieler has made it his life-long ideological goal to bring some sort of accountability to the shadow force known as the Federal Reserve. He has penned up op-eds in the Wall Street Journal about monetary policy and is chairman of the American Principles Project, a non-profit that trumps the idea that we must return to the gold standard. In an interview with goldmoney.com, he praises several Tea Party candidates for making significant ideological progress on the issue.

Moving on to Chick-fil-A nexus, Fieler is also a sitting member of the Institute for American Values, which oversees the Center for Marriage & Families. On its website, the company’s mission statement reads,
“The Center for Marriage and Families seeks to study and strengthen marriage as an institution that opens social opportunity, nurtures bonds between parents and children, organizes the care of the vulnerable from the beginning to the end of life, and enables the whole person to thrive.”
 
With that in mind, the organization comes off as a group that is vastly worried about the state of marriage in the United States, arguing that single motherhood leads to poverty, wedding as an institution is in danger of destruction from a changing society and other points that would make the Stepford Wives proud. We point out his inclusion in this group as a juxtaposition to his other position as an advisory member of the National Bible Association. Their motto? “The secret is in the Book.”
What’s more frightening then a hedge fund and the institution of marriage? We have no idea.

Unfortunately, this will be the last installment in our ‘Mitt Loves N.Y.’ series. Throughout all the profiles I’ve written in regards to Restore Our Future’s wealthy NYC denizens/donors, it comes to a point where I start to repeat myself and the themes that go along with the Citizens United beat. And, as a writer, that is a red flag to start afresh. However, we hope you enjoyed all of our works in this series – and will take the information into account come November.

 
Until then, cheers and, for this election, may God help us.

More:

Highlights