Biden Inc. - How Biden family fortunes have closely tracked Joe's political career

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Biden Inc.
Over his decades in office, ‘Middle-Class Joe’s’ family fortunes have closely tracked his political career.
by Ben Schreckinger
August 02, 2019

The day the Bidens took over Paradigm Global Advisors was a memorable one.

In the late summer of 2006 Joe Biden’s son Hunter and Joe’s younger brother, James, purchased the firm. On their first day on the job, they showed up with Joe’s other son, Beau, and two large men and ordered the hedge fund’s chief of compliance to fire its president, according to a Paradigm executive who was present.

After the firing, the two large men escorted the fund’s president out of the firm’s midtown Manhattan office, and James Biden laid out his vision for the fund’s future. “Don’t worry about investors,” he said, according to the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation. “We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”

At the time, the senator was just months away from both assuming the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second presidential bid. According to the executive, James Biden made it clear he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We've got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.

At this, the executive recalled, Beau Biden, who was then running for attorney general of Delaware, turned bright red. He told his uncle, “This can never leave this room, and if you ever say it again, I will have nothing to do with this.”
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James and Hunter are another story. There is no indication the Bidens ever succeeded in bringing new foreign money into the fund, but their involvement with Paradigm, which spanned the final two years of Joe’s Senate career and first two years of his vice presidency, was troubled for other reasons: In James and Hunter’s five-year tenure, Paradigm became associated with a number of alleged and confirmed frauds, including Allen Stanford’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, while seeking to draw on their powerful relative’s political allies for financing.

The pattern of dubious associations and possible conflicts of interest would continue later with Hunter’s foreign dealings, which led him to a lucrative appointment to the board of a Ukrainian oil company and to deals with firms connected to the Chinese state. But it started far earlier.
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In the 1970s, as Joe was entering the Senate and taking a seat on the Banking Committee, James obtained unusually generous loans from lenders who later faced federal regulatory issues. Joe Biden was in touch with two of those banks about his brother’s loans, once to scold a bank executive about invoking his name in attempts to collect on overdue payments.
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In the early 2000s, before working with his uncle, Hunter had opened a lobbying practice that landed clients with interests that overlapped with Joe’s committee assignments and legislative priorities. Ahead of his father’s second presidential bid, he entered the hedge fund business with James.
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In 2017, Joe Biden told a Vanity Fair writer that he sometimes wished that one of his children had gotten rich in order to provide for him in his old age.

Biden and his wife, Jill, have set about providing for themselves, earning more than $15 million in the two years following the end of his vice presidency in early 2017.

Hunter recently told The New Yorker that he lives on $4,000 a month and that he offered to pay his ex-wife $37,000 a month in alimony and child support for 10 years.

In 2012, Fox Business pegged James Biden’s net worth at $7 million. In 2013, James and Sara Biden bought a vacation house on Keewaydin Island in Florida for $2.5 million. While the house served for several years as a family getaway amid beautiful surroundings, it did not pay off as an investment. After James and Sara put it on the market in early 2016 with an initial asking price of $5.9 million; it sold for just $1.35 million in 2018.

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