Posted on 01/14/2012 8:24:24 AM PST by Pride_of_the_Bluegrass
Want to see what America would look like without private equity? Move to Detroit and contemplate the ruins of a city ruined by the placid conformity of auto industry executives. The economic impact of the corporate takeover business can’t be measured by the outcome of takeovers as such. Private equity transformed the way American business thought about the world. If managers did a lousy job, outside investors could raise money (a lot of it from trade union pension funds as well as university endowments) and kick them out.
Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry should be ashamed of themselves for bean-counting Bain Capital’s record on job creation. Any investment firm operating over decades of rapid employment growth will be able to show that the companies it bought added jobs over time. That’s what the academic studies on private equity show in any event, as Jordan Weissmann reports at The Atlantic. More relevant is the alternative. We’ve been there, done that, and don’t want to do it again
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Who is spengler?
Well, at least the goofy defenders of “capitalism” are calling it private equity now instead of venture capital. That’s progress, I suppose.
He died in 33”.
“Decline of the West”
Believed societies have life cycles. etc
Some quotes:
“Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.” Oswald Spengler
“Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.”
“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and the war aims and operating plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. There is no more appalling caricature of freedom of thought. Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom.”
http://www.great-quotes.com/quotes/author/Oswald/Spengler
From what I’ve read, the facts about Bain are not as clear as some would have us believe. I am still trying to find out exactly what happened. I have, however, seen a video and some articles which do not put Bain in a positive light. If these articles are true, Mitt Romney even if the nominee would have a hard time being elected. They will hang the Bain problem around his neck, and he will sink.
From what I’ve read, the facts about Bain are not as clear as some would have us believe. I am still trying to find out exactly what happened. I have, however, seen a video and some articles which do not put Bain in a positive light. If these articles are true, Mitt Romney even if the nominee would have a hard time being elected. They will hang the Bain problem around his neck, and he will sink.
Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends.Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts.
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* Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-'90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
* Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
* Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
* Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.
Romney's Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in these five businesses, making a $578 million profit.
No,no, not Oswald Spengler, I meant who was the pajamas media blogger that uses Spengler as a psuedonym!
Whether or not the “facts about Bain” are true does not matter...the DEMS will take the worst and explode them into massive news stories to destroy Romney and the GOP.
OH SORRY.
The editor of First Things, I think.
“The way the company was rescued was with a federal bailout of $10 million,” the ad says. “The rest of us had to absorb the loss … Romney? He and others made $4 million in this deal. … Mitt Romney: Maybe he’s just against government when it helps working men and women.”
The facts of the Bain & Co. turnaround are a little more complicated, but a Boston Globe report from 1994 confirms that Bain saw several million dollars in loans forgiven by the FDIC, which had taken over Bain’s failed creditor, the Bank of New England.
Romney aides pushed back strongly on the Democratic charge that Bain & Co. received anything like a TARP-style “bailout.” While the FDIC is a government agency, it is funded by deposit insurance payments rather than taxes. The agency agreed to reduce Bain & Co.’s liability to the Bank of New England, but didn’t pump new funds into the flagging firm. Other Bain creditors also took a haircut in order to avert the company’s collapse.**************
Both the Republican Establishment and the Democratic Establishment are in alliance with venture capitalists. Bain contributed more to the Democratic Party than to the Republicans. Heck, Jay Gould, the 19th century vulture, played the same political game. He gave his money to Republicans and Democrats alike. With Romney on the ticket, I will lose all hope that “Obamacare”will be repealed in toto. The Establishment wants most of it, because it will give them effective control of the medical sector, and allows their friends to dump their costs onto the taxpayers. This is what we get by splitting the conservative vote. Palin could have united it, but they would have run some spoilers against her. I guess she saw how much money was stacked against her, how the deck was stacked. That Washington is controlled by the same plutocrats that ran Alaska.
Why capitalists have always had a bad reputation. Venture capitalists are riverboat gamblers at heart, but they do their level best to control the cards. They use a fresh deck only when the House demands it.
He is David Goldman who uses the pen name Spengler and has a column in the Asia Times Online called “The Complete Spengler”.
Link here: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/others/spengler.html
He also has a good book, currently out, entitled “Why Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam is dying too)”
Thanks. Just wondered which one of those pajamas media guys would write such a thing as that.
He has his point. Leveraged buyout were developed in part because the traditional means of getting rid of complacent management - proxy fights - were almost impossible to win.
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