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I don't understand how bigger waves haven't yet been made about these locusts. Where's the New York Times expose? Proposals by Congress on how to make this vamp
by _bxg1 7y ago
I don't understand how bigger waves haven't yet been made about these locusts. Where's the New York Times expose? Proposals by Congress on how to make this vampirism illegal? Literally anything?
- echoesofthepast 7y agoTucker Carlson had a good segment on one example of private equity destroying a small American town by bankrupting a business that was by all measures doing well. I haven't seen it anywhere else in mainstream media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdwH066g5lQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdwH066g5lQ
- gunn 7y agoExcellent clip thank you.
- mcv 7y agoHasn't John Oliver done an item about this a few years ago?
- ubermonkey 7y agoYes.
- swarnie_ 7y agoCan anyone link? As a limey Brit id rather listen to John Oliver then this Tucker chap. (seriously this passes for news?)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ilikehurdles 7y agoNo, it's considered entertainment.
- alistairSH 7y agoNo, Tucker Carlson is not news. He's a pundit/commentator who has a talk show. Neither is John Oliver. I'd almost say they're flip sides of the same coin, except Carlson trends WAY right (often right into conspiracy theory land) and Oliver is more center-left.
- Accujack 7y agoOliver is a journalist, though. That's why Snowden granted him an interview first, before anyone else in the world. Sure, he's humorous, but he's not offering his opinions except in the most general terms. He follows facts, not hype.
- brain5ide 7y agoI thought he was a comedian.
- mcv 7y agoHe is a comedian, and always denies being news. That doesn't change the fact that his show is one of the most informative shows on TV. It absolutely is journalism what he's doing. He's just dressing it up in jokes.
- philwelch 7y agoNo, John Oliver is most definitely a comedian.
- r00fus 7y agoPresumably lots of dollars does a lot of talking all on its own. Ill gotten or not.
- thawaway1837 7y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&endDate=20200107&query=Private%20equity%20bankruptcy&sort=best&startDate=20190107 https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&endDate=2020010... There’s like 10 different companies discussed on the first page itself, including the specific company here. I mean, it’s all over mainstream media.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rodgerd 7y agoI mean it was a core plot point of Pretty Woman back in 1990. People are aware of asset strippers.
- rolltiide 7y agoAll the messages in that movie really bother me just because it's so unrelatable as a man. Many women I know see it as just a prince charming story and like it because of that. Aside from the corporate raiding married man picking up prostitutes on business travel, I think I'd find it more relatable if there was a world where women were reliably scooping up men while the man's life was in shambles and changing their life situation. But no, if you want companionship as a man even if its the unhealthy kind, you have to have a big expense account. 1 out of 5
- CuriouslyC 7y agoWould you chase after a fat, ugly, disgusting woman? I'm guessing no unless you were incredibly desperate. Most women are attracted to a man's status and success the way most men are attracted to physical beauty. You don't need a lot of money, but women don't want to hang around with loser.
- rolltiide 7y ago> Most women are attracted to a man's status and success the way most men are attracted to physical beauty. oh wow, I never heard of that happening before thanks for the tip. Like I said, the movie itself would be more relatable if any possibility of the circumstances were relatable for a man. For women its practical to dream about a man choosing them for qualities they were born with while the man created every circumstance in their own life to obtain wealth and security before eventually decide to choose that woman, and that movie caters to that. It took me a while to figure out why certain romance movies were unappealing and predictably so between genders, and that's what it is. I don't actually care about or mind the reality. The extent of my point is that watching depictions of it aren't interesting when no part of it is something you can dream about and have a chance of it happening.
- 7y ago
- wmeredith 7y agoIt has been extremely well-covered in the media. The oligarchs in Congress don’t care.
- asdf21 7y agoWhy should they care? I'm not sure anyone has made a case as far as exactly what should be regulated here. Should businesses not be allowed to take on too much debt?
- rolltiide 7y agoI don't live in a world where companies stand by their financial contractual agreements to employees or even offer them. It is also obvious to me that the companies that did this often don't have the money to fulfill it. Why would I want a law to warp the market even further to protect pensions and these zombie companies? Perhaps my observations reflect the sentiment of others and that's why bigger waves haven't been made, because we don't care about this slow motion trainwreck. Lever up
- fennecfoxen 7y agoIf you want to fix this going forward, make all new defined-benefit pensions plans illegal, as we have amply demonstrated that they can't be trusted over the course of a lifetime. Putting your future in the hands of an automaker was bad enough; why do we expect someone to put their future in the hands of a dairy? A defined-contribution pension plan, where you end up actually owning the assets in question, is the only way to be sure that no one will shrink your pension in bankruptcy, or (for a public pension) reduce them by legislative fiat.
- matthewdgreen 7y agoThis just turns into another class of scam, where a different class of financial vampire takes the guaranteed stream of revenue from your pension system and systematically diverts a larger and larger share into their own pocket.
- fennecfoxen 7y agoHistorically? Maybe a little, yeah, but even at ridiculous rate of, say, 2% annual fees, you're just not looking at the same sort of massive capital losses you could expect following a major corporate insolvency... And more and more pension funds offer low-fee index funds than ever before. Praise Vanguard.
- Spooky23 7y agoOr not allow the type of behavior that makes these boring industries less boring. Borden has been around for like 150 years. The whole scenario of giant global entities taking over agriculture and food services is probably the most obviously bad but ok things that will happen in my lifetime. We've declared dairy some sort of environmental catastrophe, to be replaced by cloudy water percolated through soy, almonds and similar products, which ultimately will roll up to 4-6 companies like Coke, Pepsi, Inbev, etc.
- ghaff 7y ago>A defined-contribution pension plan, where you end up actually owning the assets in question Assuming of course that you have actually saved over time and have picked appropriate assets to invest in. Defined benefit plans have their problems--both the funding and the fact that they were historically designed around long-term employment at a single organization. But they do have the virtue of being a retirement income stream that requires no action on an employee's part. ADDED: >no one will shrink your pension in bankruptcy Except the market depending upon where you have invested your money
- rtpg 7y agoI mean it’s been a huge thing that people have known about for decades. Romney was one of them. Barbarians at the Gate is a popular book on KKR in particular and was made into a movie. As to why it’s not illegal... there’s both the realpolitik “who are friends with congresspeople” as well as the wonky “how do you make it illegal? It’s just combining a lot of elements of capitalism” The way you make it illegal, of course, is preventing stuff like directors being able to get paid big bonuses for buyouts (basically bribes to accept LBOs), by properly classifying such movements as stealing assets from the company
- dwnvoted2hell 7y agoTruly. Most terrorists have nothing over these guys.
- LatteLazy 7y agoSome of them are vampires, sucking blood from healthy individuals. But some are just maggots: recycling resources that would otherwise be wasted and cause wider infections. Which is which (and when since they switch roles sometimes) is a matter of opinion not fact. You can't really regulate that any more than you can arrest people for being "bad"...
- duxup 7y agoI've certainly seen a handful of NYT articles that weren't shy about pointing out the mess that is left behind and questioning what if any economic value there is.
- jandrese 7y agoArticle from today: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/07/leveraged-buyouts.html https://boingboing.net/2020/01/07/leveraged-buyouts.html
- dfxm12 7y agoProposals by Congress on how to make this vampirism illegal? If this is an issue for you, vote in members of Congress who care about this. There's an election coming up this year. Your representative in the house will be on the ballot, and maybe one of your senators. Please find out where the candidates on your ballot stand on this issue.
- eldavido 7y agoHave you or any of your friends ever worked in a non-tech, non-finance business? Many of them are incredibly poorly run. Bad hiring practices, little/no investment in operations or process, etc. All I'm saying is, you have to look case by case at what's going on. Sometimes the PE firm does basically loot the business. In others, entrenched management has been there decades with little board or investor oversight, is performing way below the rest of the industry, and really does need a swift kick in the ass. Don't rush to blame the PE guys here anyway. Everyone knows Americans are drinking much less milk, they probably bought it at a deep discount knowing they might not be able to turn it into a successful business, and that bet failed.
- L_Rahman 7y agoTech and finance businesses are also horribly run. There's no evidence suggesting managerial or process excellence in technology companies. The reason finance and technology companies are profitable has everything to do with the nature of the product they create and the leverage it has in our society today. Finance is famous for making people sitting at their desks all day waiting to get a deck at 11AM to put in logos with the correct resolution.
- eldavido 7y agoNo. They're better run because they're more competitive and only the best-run firms survive. There is more pressure toward excellence, and pay reflects this. Can you name me the 10th-best PC operating system maker? No, you can't, because there isn't one. Whereas I'm sure the management practices of a typical small-town pizza shop aren't great. I'll grant that perhaps companies get lazy if they're monopolies but that doesn't last forever. I just think it's silly to suggest that companies in cutthroat, competitive industries are less high-performance than average, smaller firms.
- filmgirlcw 7y agoI mean, books have been written about PE, LBOs, raiders, and financial vampires for more than 30 years. Movies have been made. It’s literally one of the most enduring financial stories of the last 35 years. The only thing that has changed is that PE has managed to take some cues from VCs and mount a PR campaign aimed at techies and other new-money types to make it seem like the industry isn’t as vulturistic as it has always been. And techies and new-money investors believe them. Because it’s easy to believe the wolf until he kills you or leaves you for dead.
- L_Rahman 7y agoIt's hard for the NYTimes to run stories on the evils of private equity when their employees and owners are completely intertwined with the people who work in that industry. I can't overstate the degree to which all the different industries in New York socially overlap. The degree of separation between someone who works in technology, media, finance, publishing and advertising is 0 or 1. Those relationships become marriages, friendships, acquaintances, people sitting next to you at charity dinner. Perhaps most critically the Times is a family owned business, the owners are billionaires, the current owner is also it's publisher. They have no interest in poking around the fundamental mechanics of how rich people operate in this country. Shiny stories of fraud or insider trading or whistleblowing? Absolutely. But questioning the core mechanics of capital, especially capital centered in New York operates would never happen.