by ilene - February 5th, 2010 1:57 pm
Vintage Wine Turns Sour for Financiers
By Alex Daley and Doug Hornig, Casey Research
When the folks at a private equity firm gather at the holiday party refreshment table to talk about “vintage,” they aren’t commenting on the Château Pétrus.
The world of private equity financing doesn’t have high visibility, but it is big business behind the scenes. Unlike venture capital outfits – which provide startup money to very early-stage companies – those who play this game grab existing private companies, often through leveraged buyouts (LBOs). Each year’s investments are referred to as vintages, with some being more highly drinkable than others.
Now, some of the recent vintages look like they’ll turn out to be little more than vinegar.
Private equity investing has never been for the faint of heart. But investors continue to engage in it, because the payoff can be substantial. And for the first few years of the new millennium, it was a go-go place to be. With so much easy money sloshing around, the number of PE deals exploded, totaling over half a trillion dollars at the manic peak in ’07.
Then came the crash:
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It’s important to remember that credit was not a single bubble. It was a bubble machine. It created the housing bubble, which fueled the personal debt bubble (which in turn popped the housing bubble, but that’s another story). The mortgage market gave birth to a whole new range of derivatives, things like collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), and the rest of the acronyms we’ve all become familiar with, even if we don’t quite understand what they do. (Don’t be embarrassed, neither did the financial geniuses who swapped them like baseball cards.)
Frantic trading in these newly printed scraps of paper created its own bubble, manufacturing an incredible amount of seeming liquidity in a very compressed time frame. We know the ultimate consequences to the balance sheets of our banks, and our government, by now. But there was more to it than that. The capital these transactions threw off had to go somewhere, and suddenly well-capitalized investors were pouring their…
Tags: Casey Research, financiers, IPO, private equity
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by ilene - October 30th, 2009 1:17 am
Courtesy of Jesse’s Café Américain
For the first time we had a ‘jobless recovery’ after the tech bubble bust thanks to the wonders of Greenspan’s monetary expansion and the willingness (gullibility?) of the average American to assume enormous amounts of debt, largely based on home mortgages, the house as ATM phenomenon. Not to mention the large, unfunded expenditures of the government thanks to tax cuts and multiple wars.
Now the pundits are talking about the hopes for another jobless recovery.
Who is going to go deeply into debt this time? It looks like its the government’s turn. And the expectation is that foreigners will continue to suck up the debt.
If you think this explosion of Federal debt will facilitate a stronger US dollar you might be suffering from ideological myopia or some other delusion.
Some years ago we forecast that the financiers and their elites would take the world down this road of leveraged debt and malinvestment, and then make you an offer that they think you cannot refuse. They will seek to frighten you with a collapse of the existing financial order, because that is what they fear the most themselves, for their own unique positions of power.
The offer will be a one world currency, which is a giant step towards a one world government, managed by them of course. Once you control the money, local fiscal and social preferences start to matter less and less.
This theory seems more plausible today than it did then.
Tags: Federal debt, financiers, jobless recovery, one world currency
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.