5 ms·

Not sure if it's completely related, but my dad will sometimes talk about the "Yuppie Time" during the 80's, when he tried to get funding for some rather big IT

by kebman 6y ago

Not sure if it's completely related, but my dad will sometimes talk about the "Yuppie Time" during the 80's, when he tried to get funding for some rather big IT projects. There would be well connected "yuppies" getting funding and loans for just about anything, so they could make short-term investments, and then run away with the profits as quick as they could. Most of these guys weren't interesting in building something lasting, though, so it was important to quickly identify them, and then just turn them down no matter how much funding they promised. Not easy, as these guys would seem pretty flush with cash. Seemingly. But oftentimes it would leave companies, and also employees, ruined after such a run. The hope was to make a lasting impression on the communities they wanted to start up within, by giving people something tangible and safe to build up long-term. However yuppies would offer anything but, so while you could sit in a nice and comfy office on the one day, you'd be out on the street on the next. Think Wolf of Wall Street. Hardly a secure environment to stake your future in. And indeed, eventually it did go south for a lot of folks by the crash of '87, and also the aftermath in '89.

seibelj 6y ago
All sorts of these shenanigans continue in various forms. I know of one company that received an absurd valuation and funding amount from a Russian oligarch to attack a very difficult and established industry, then got acquired 2 years later by a different Russian company for a large return. They hadn’t built anything, they had leased a large office with open windows on the first floor near mine, and every time I walked by they looked dead inside. Easy answer - washed a large amount of money for the oligarch after the acquisition (clean transfer from Russian acquirer to oligarch plus its advantageous tax treatment).
- sheeshkebab 6y ago
  Taking money from various Russian and Chinese newly rich crowd usually means dealing with mafia or governments/military (and thugs and government are much closer together in those places than elsewhere).
  - specialist 6y ago
    I think about this all the time. Not the "honest graft", which I can kinda wrap my head around. What worries more are the hidden economies. The traditional trifecta of drugs, arms, human trafficking. Which would probably now include industrial espionage, demographic data, computer security stuff. (Just occurs to me this may be the "Dark Web" category.) The kind of stuff mid-career Seymour Hersh covered. I really thought Sibel Edmonds' whistle blowing was going to mainstream this topic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibel_Edmonds https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibel_Edmonds I guess I feel like there are so many hidden factors, of significant influence, that talking about visible finance, corruption, globalization, whatever feels wholly inadequate.
    - mofosyne 6y ago
      Reminds me of the Paradise papers leaks and how the journalist uncovering an international potential money laundering operation got car bombed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia
      - specialist 6y ago
        Agreed. Honestly, I try to not think too hard about all the people who've been killed, punished. It quickly takes me to a very dark place. Back when I was working on election integrity I fully expected to be arrested, end up in jail and then prison. Maybe a dozen activists before me (nationwide) got pretty roughed up for telling the truth.
- w4hirelife99 6y ago
  What’s that? You mean they took gambling addicts and gave them control of humanities efforts at scale? It’s all gone wrong? Shocking! Why, a minority of global power brokers have NEVER, in the history of humanity, used their sway over the masses to abuse their trust. Most financial crimes are still just plain old “paper cons”. They lie on the paperwork. At least in the US, regulatory agencies are so underfunded or had their mission altered such that “paper cons” happen constantly. Panama Papers, many of Trumps tax dodge schemes (among others, calling him out because of viz, all those guys “do it”) etc All very obvious, well known financial schemes. Basically the origin of the word privilege comes from Latin “privy lege” ... “privileged by the law”. Humanity is still ruled by ruthless tribalists looking to conquer the globe. Ain’t nothing changed about it except the literal “who”, and sound forms and visual glyphs used to describe. We use a lot less Latin and romantic notions of higher powers in the sky, but still kowtow to hierarchy based upon scientific bullshit, convincing people “THESE annotations of the numbers are it, boy howdy! We def got IT right this generation! Sorry about rocket cars, but our finance scheme numbers keep going up so we did it!” Still biologically motivated to the same ends.
  - kazinator 6y ago
    The paperwork has to lie to cover up the misappropriation of actual money. If the paperwork's lie were the only problem, then it could just be corrected to account for the theft, and all would be well.
  - lowmemcpu 6y ago
    TBH, the satirical tone makes your reply difficult to read and weakens your argument, if any. I'm really not sure what you're position even is - you could have just said, "history is cyclical" or "nothing has changed"
  - dang 6y ago
    Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... Also, please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. That's in the site guidelines also.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- alchemism 6y ago
  I’ve seen this done with New York City commercial real estate, ‘accidentally’ sold far-below market rate to a party which flipped the property within 90 days at (many) millions higher valuation. After this transaction occurred, coincidentally an IRS investigation into offshore Cayman accounts was decided to have no merit and dropped.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    This is a major part of Donald Trump's business. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-businesses-are-full-of-dirty-russian-money-the-scandal-is-thats-legal/2019/03/29/11b812da-5171-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-businesses-are...
- jondubois 6y ago
  Of course, all investments these days are a form of money laundering. Most funding is derived from loan credit which has been moved around a network of companies. The companies on the front line keep funneling the credit to big corporations and then eventually declare bankruptcy, then new companies spawn up to take their place. It's a systematized global money laundering scheme which extends all the way to the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. This game involves separating credit from its underlying debt obligation, collecting the credit and then letting another limited liability corporate entity take the fall for not being able to meet the debt obligation. This is basically what Carl Icahn did with Hertz - He made Hertz take huge loans from banks, then Hertz awarded one of Carl's other companies a huge multi-million dollar contract using that loan money, then Hertz declared bankrupcy. Carl gets to keep the money he received from that big contract. Carl gets the credit, Hertz takes the fall. Carl took no risks and added no value. When you also consider that those initial loans are printed out of thin air by banks, it becomes clear that our economy is founded on legitimized fraud. We have a system which rewards fraudsters at the expense of honest people. What is the difference between right and wrong when the law itself encourages wrongdoing? Nobody seems to knows what is the difference between right and wrong anymore. If the law said it was OK to kill people, we would all start killing each other the next day. That's how superficial our morals have become.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    The problem with your logic is that Hertz has physical assets and IP (at a minimum the brand) which the creditors will then own. But I agree with you that the rot at the bottom of the system begins with the federal reserve and our endless money printing. In a hard-money system banks actually care about the loans they make.
    - jondubois 6y ago
      When companies go bankrupt these days, usually there aren't enough assets left to cover the loss for creditors - Especially tech companies whose main assets are intangible IP which loses all of its value when the company goes down.

by kebman 6y ago

seibelj 6y ago

All sorts of these shenanigans continue in various forms. I know of one company that received an absurd valuation and funding amount from a Russian oligarch to attack a very difficult and established industry, then got acquired 2 years later by a different Russian company for a large return. They hadn’t built anything, they had leased a large office with open windows on the first floor near mine, and every time I walked by they looked dead inside. Easy answer - washed a large amount of money for the oligarch after the acquisition (clean transfer from Russian acquirer to oligarch plus its advantageous tax treatment).

sheeshkebab 6y ago
Taking money from various Russian and Chinese newly rich crowd usually means dealing with mafia or governments/military (and thugs and government are much closer together in those places than elsewhere).
- specialist 6y ago
  I think about this all the time. Not the "honest graft", which I can kinda wrap my head around. What worries more are the hidden economies. The traditional trifecta of drugs, arms, human trafficking. Which would probably now include industrial espionage, demographic data, computer security stuff. (Just occurs to me this may be the "Dark Web" category.) The kind of stuff mid-career Seymour Hersh covered. I really thought Sibel Edmonds' whistle blowing was going to mainstream this topic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibel_Edmonds https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibel_Edmonds I guess I feel like there are so many hidden factors, of significant influence, that talking about visible finance, corruption, globalization, whatever feels wholly inadequate.
  - mofosyne 6y ago
    Reminds me of the Paradise papers leaks and how the journalist uncovering an international potential money laundering operation got car bombed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia
    - specialist 6y ago
      Agreed. Honestly, I try to not think too hard about all the people who've been killed, punished. It quickly takes me to a very dark place. Back when I was working on election integrity I fully expected to be arrested, end up in jail and then prison. Maybe a dozen activists before me (nationwide) got pretty roughed up for telling the truth.
w4hirelife99 6y ago
What’s that? You mean they took gambling addicts and gave them control of humanities efforts at scale? It’s all gone wrong? Shocking! Why, a minority of global power brokers have NEVER, in the history of humanity, used their sway over the masses to abuse their trust. Most financial crimes are still just plain old “paper cons”. They lie on the paperwork. At least in the US, regulatory agencies are so underfunded or had their mission altered such that “paper cons” happen constantly. Panama Papers, many of Trumps tax dodge schemes (among others, calling him out because of viz, all those guys “do it”) etc All very obvious, well known financial schemes. Basically the origin of the word privilege comes from Latin “privy lege” ... “privileged by the law”. Humanity is still ruled by ruthless tribalists looking to conquer the globe. Ain’t nothing changed about it except the literal “who”, and sound forms and visual glyphs used to describe. We use a lot less Latin and romantic notions of higher powers in the sky, but still kowtow to hierarchy based upon scientific bullshit, convincing people “THESE annotations of the numbers are it, boy howdy! We def got IT right this generation! Sorry about rocket cars, but our finance scheme numbers keep going up so we did it!” Still biologically motivated to the same ends.
- kazinator 6y ago
  The paperwork has to lie to cover up the misappropriation of actual money. If the paperwork's lie were the only problem, then it could just be corrected to account for the theft, and all would be well.
- lowmemcpu 6y ago
  TBH, the satirical tone makes your reply difficult to read and weakens your argument, if any. I'm really not sure what you're position even is - you could have just said, "history is cyclical" or "nothing has changed"
- dang 6y ago
  Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... Also, please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. That's in the site guidelines also.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
alchemism 6y ago
I’ve seen this done with New York City commercial real estate, ‘accidentally’ sold far-below market rate to a party which flipped the property within 90 days at (many) millions higher valuation. After this transaction occurred, coincidentally an IRS investigation into offshore Cayman accounts was decided to have no merit and dropped.
- sukilot 6y ago
  This is a major part of Donald Trump's business. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-businesses-are-full-of-dirty-russian-money-the-scandal-is-thats-legal/2019/03/29/11b812da-5171-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-businesses-are...
jondubois 6y ago
Of course, all investments these days are a form of money laundering. Most funding is derived from loan credit which has been moved around a network of companies. The companies on the front line keep funneling the credit to big corporations and then eventually declare bankruptcy, then new companies spawn up to take their place. It's a systematized global money laundering scheme which extends all the way to the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. This game involves separating credit from its underlying debt obligation, collecting the credit and then letting another limited liability corporate entity take the fall for not being able to meet the debt obligation. This is basically what Carl Icahn did with Hertz - He made Hertz take huge loans from banks, then Hertz awarded one of Carl's other companies a huge multi-million dollar contract using that loan money, then Hertz declared bankrupcy. Carl gets to keep the money he received from that big contract. Carl gets the credit, Hertz takes the fall. Carl took no risks and added no value. When you also consider that those initial loans are printed out of thin air by banks, it becomes clear that our economy is founded on legitimized fraud. We have a system which rewards fraudsters at the expense of honest people. What is the difference between right and wrong when the law itself encourages wrongdoing? Nobody seems to knows what is the difference between right and wrong anymore. If the law said it was OK to kill people, we would all start killing each other the next day. That's how superficial our morals have become.
- seibelj 6y ago
  The problem with your logic is that Hertz has physical assets and IP (at a minimum the brand) which the creditors will then own. But I agree with you that the rot at the bottom of the system begins with the federal reserve and our endless money printing. In a hard-money system banks actually care about the loans they make.
  - jondubois 6y ago
    When companies go bankrupt these days, usually there aren't enough assets left to cover the loss for creditors - Especially tech companies whose main assets are intangible IP which loses all of its value when the company goes down.