In the years that Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick led one of the world’s largest hedge funds, the firm bet millions of dollars against some of the state’s biggest and most iconic companies, financial filings show. Under McCormick’s leadership, Bridgewater Associates shorted the stocks of nearly 50 companies headquartered in Pennsylvania, including The Hershey Company and US Steel, a CNN review of records from the US Department of Labor found.
“A lot of people do think of short sellers as being predatory or betting on failure – but there is, I think, some social value to what they do,” said Andrew Jennings, a professor at Emory University School of Law. “In an ecosystem, there are predators… but they’re part of the system. They keep things in balance.