Stop feeding the vultures

I get the idea that Eric Hermann doesn't want to talk to me. When I came to his office suite, his hedge fund's name plaque had been unbolted from the building's wall, the suite number removed and all the employees locked in. I'm not surprised. Hermann is a vulture, not the carrion-eating type, but the kind that prey on the financially wounded. "Vulture" is a hedge fund industry term for the financiers who buy up the right to collect old loans of the world's poorest nations, and then use every trick in the book–from lawsuits to bribery to hiring Henry Kissinger's lobby firm–to muscle destitute countries into turning over their meager foreign aid funds. Vultures, whether of the feathered or speculator species, don't like to talk to reporters. On February 25, the day after BBC Television's Newsnight ran my report from in front of Hermann's locked office door, Britain's Parliament voted to bar vulture funds from using Britain's courts to grab the assets of poor nations. And what about the United States? Why are our own politicians cowering behind legislative locked doors?