Vulture capital

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   </font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1119 broadened to pvt equity/ hedge funds predators</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">rent seekers extracting debt</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see also disaster capitalism</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><div><div><a href="https://www.salon.com/2015/03/22/vulture_capitalists_are_picking_us_dry_why_consumer_debt_buyers_are_on_the_rise_partner/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.salon.com/2015/03/22/vulture_capitalists_are_picking_us_dry_why_consumer_debt_buyers_are_on_the_rise_partner/</font></a></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Vulture capitalists</span> are picking us dry: Why consumer debt buyers are on the rise</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The great recession laid waste to the U.S. economy. Now debt collectors are feasting on the carrion</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JIM HIGHTOWER</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>MARCH 22, 2015 </b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Good news, people: The "boom" is back! Yes, good times are here again, thanks to an economic boom that's being generated by (of all things) bad times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As you might know from your own experiences, tens of millions of Americans have been hit hard, knocked down and held down in recent years by the collapse of jobs and wages. This calamity has led to a second blow for millions of the same families, who find themselves suddenly buried in piles of overdue bills for credit card charges, student loans and other consumer debt.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the good news is that there's a bright silver lining in that dark financial cloud. Only, it's not for the indebted families, but for a booming breed of finance hucksters known as consumer debt buyers. Believe it or not, in the warped world of high finance,"There's gold in them thar hills" of bad debt, and where there's gold, there are diggers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Whenever a corporation issues a statement declaring that it's committed to "treating consumers fairly and with respect," chances are, it's not.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After all, why say such a thing, when actually practicing it would make a statement unnecessary? Indeed, with names like Encore Capital Group and Sherman Financial, these miners of human misery buy bales of these unpaid bills from banks and other lenders, paying pennies on the dollar. Then they unleash packs of their hard-nosed, aggressive collectors on the families. If they still can't extract payment, the corporate debt profiteers turn to their meanest dog: The courts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Debt firms routinely file thousands of lawsuits a day against financially devastated Americans</b>. They know that most debtors can't understand the legal gibberish filed against them, can't afford a lawyer, can't take time off to go to a court hearing and can't mount an effective defense against the corporate lawyers. So, some 95 percent of these lawsuits produce default judgments against hapless borrowers -- meaning debt buyers can then confiscate the wages of borrowers or freeze their bank accounts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This boom in vulture capitalism is disgusting -- but, worse, it's subsidized by us taxpayers! We pay for the judicial system -- the judges, courtrooms and endless rounds of hearings. Predatory debt corporations have perverted our so-called justice system into their own subsidiary for squeezing profits out of destitute debtors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This is why New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has started going after these for-profit corporate debt collectors. He found that Encore, based in San Diego, filed nearly 240,000 lawsuits against debtors in a recent four-year period, using the courts as its private collection arm.</span> Problem is, Encore's bulk filing of lawsuits against the hard-pressed borrowers are rife with errors, out-of-date payment data, fabricated credit card statements, etc. With debt buyers scooping up millions of overdue bills each year from lenders, tons of them are missing original loan documents, payment histories and other proof of debt.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Debt predators, however, scoot around this lack of facts by simply having their employees sign affidavits asserting that the level of money owed is accurate. Judges, overwhelmed by the unending flood of lawsuits filed by Encore et al, have accepted those affidavits as true, thus ruling in favor of the corporations. But Schneiderman found that -- Surprise! -- affidavits were simply being rubber-stamped by company employees, with no effort to ensure the truth of the information. An employee of one large debt-buyer testified that his corporation ran an assembly-line scheme in which he signed about 2,000 affidavits a day.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is no minor scam -- 1 in 7 adults in the U.S. is under pursuit by debt collectors. It's hard enough for struggling families to claw their way out from under the economic crash without having lying, cheating predator corporations twist the court system to pick their pockets and shut off their hope of recovery.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JIM HIGHTOWER</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jim Hightower's most recent book is "Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush." He produces a monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, and a syndicated daily radio commentary.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1119</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">invert yield curve; homewreckers book 8 mil foreclosures; big % llc shell corps; // CDO; R wolff says banks can't deal with hit 1/2 of Gt Recession , get loans to cover loans; mnuchin etc wilbur recalled gov't baillout after S&L; mnu sez put 1.x billion but pain nothing for indybank and then got subsidies to foreclose?! // get car for free, put some bucks in then pocket total profit 11/8/19</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">new</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">steve mnu piad 0 for indy bank, and gov't guar lose no money, sold to buddy in same blg (bunch of pluto-crats ) soros, paulsen, wilbur</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">extensive interview: </font><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-23-2019/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-23-2019/</a></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-october-21-2019/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-october-21-2019/</a></div><div>
</div><div>aaron glantz homewreckers</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">intercept</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(17, 17, 17) 0px 4px 0px; text-transform: uppercase;">VULTURE FUNDS SCOOPED</span> up hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Puerto Rican debt after Hurricane Maria hit — underwritten by Wall Street and purchased at a massive discount, according to new numbers compiled by the nonprofit LittleSis and provided to The Intercept.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now it’s time for the payoff. A deal agreed to last week between creditors, the Puerto Rican government and the Washington-appointed fiscal control board overseeing the island’s finances could now funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to those same bondholders in the coming decades. There’s also ample reason to suspect at least some of those funds will be siphoned from federal recovery dollars, intended to help rebuild after the storm.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to court filings made public as a result of ongoing debt negotiations, several hedge funds have bought up massive amounts of Puerto Rican bonds in the year following Hurricane Maria, after which prices dropped. GoldenTree Asset Management, a bondholder for the Urgent Interest Fund Corporation — known by its Spanish-language acronym COFINA — owned $587 million worth of Puerto Rican government bonds before the storm, as noted in a filing dated August 18, 2017. As of another filing almost exactly a year later, the company owned $1.5 billion.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tilden Park Capital Management, another COFINA creditor, increased the value of its holdings by $370 million over the same period. General obligation bondholders Aurelius Capital Management and Monarch Alternative Capital have increased their holdings from $39 million before the storm to $488 million as of the last filing. (Aurelius and Monarch both also hold some COFINA bonds.)</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></span></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font>

<strong id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1519500890346_15650" style=" font-weight: 700;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Schooling a Puerto Rico Debt Vulture</font></strong>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last year we helped<span> </span><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/JAE/ni0YAA/t.2f8/I1AXGWBrTSWQTjG7hflBag/h29/IGbuxRGxf-2FM66JIJ8i1XmnKI2ZI3I5tYh-2B8Y9dC6Qws7gG3jBrsCDBg2Gi1PQBZcj6n50w-2BA6z6CgCmfuElDdSgzBreAR3oBZx-2BIgyxbzObAaH3HD8acwpQURcgzRTCjErjsjk7SRjFgXck1jGnA8U15w0yr0IcW9PqaLTrGuNCDeni8Sn-2BoOZRYRy2LGfuS4-2B69sIfH-2BhgtM0t-2FesZRIy-2FQ0sO2dWfrUNkYtAmP092PQbFsSUSqR5CTVm-2FayEPf6U9d0roY90h4YD6V-2FOS3f4pyWvRc9Cr1d9NimVZBZgiOrC9FQ-2F31pJiJoZ7aINlT1Oiu4EwU-2FssBOOe82xwH-2BoKkcviWs-2FcVI4sU9BEccJ-2BcF-2FbE1-2BEdqHR4DIEFbWqc74YgF-2BR8XOd6zr3UP2y2Q8W5v-2BC-2FbQwD-2Fit1NNIiUY4f8586RAT6yaQHnWpAXzdaBAW6YOUnYPiCECNzLc0Hww-3D-3D" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; background: transparent; outline: none;">expose</a><span> </span>one of Puerto Rico’s biggest debt vultures - Seth Klarman and Baupost Group, the hedge fund he runs. We were excited to partner with Hedgeclippers last month to put pressure on one of Klarman’s biggest clients: Harvard University.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After a<span> </span><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/JAE/ni0YAA/t.2f8/I1AXGWBrTSWQTjG7hflBag/h31/r7pFLbTzbr-2BZErwsQwI6gh4mHSVBM1xHAAoIH0kBEKQ6-2BY8mlkrxIyPyvs-2B5iaFYcsu-2BMYedRTAQ2Hu1EDM33-2F4xL5add1oIgp5S5efJI5hbSPNRASpqw6JyKQnj2p3Ed-2FF8xysHYg1Xw9Kau89AQFoS04abEpPRB-2BqunXU8LVWzEpu4t90YzD1XkujDlKOxUvjfEwVjVp4XGzLbp7yjj5QoFEAkqIuenTBOqpHewaDwvAL6CqHachpMZv4cHpno-2BS1e9ipfZqnP4-2BGy48jud2AQJakiJSzY3N50xdhAXRM8Y3sO5hgpm4j3Znl63YYhowVeYDycRtAKigYKO-2B4xktOwgcrJCv62VcKznr-2FpdDiwWwZVGvqIUI3nQgXtzIYA-2FyVDRCz4e4KnrPpkCRBLrtBg2GpiBFzvRQTfGHOqYe-2FoiDX4rk-2BaHX-2FpAgzUfo0o-2F-2Ff6B6CU9zLhW12daDXmjMaC9L5TRnFPkPtRZcPznr6mz19C0iLcHGZqzq4vjAjDKnrUinKv1sfFPSD6e2O4RA-3D-3D" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1519500890346_15610" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; background: transparent; outline: none;">report</a><span> </span>highlighted the nearly $2 billion that Harvard has invested with Baupost, activists across the country called on the university to divest from any attempt to profit off of Puerto Rico’s misery. Other divestment calls on other universities invested with Baupost followed - from<span> </span><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/JAE/ni0YAA/t.2f8/I1AXGWBrTSWQTjG7hflBag/h32/iOvmtyc-2FttwDY2fu8CKy-2Bj0Xh4z5sElf-2B8U6WUGJUu0YYD4KoEoXRjbGZla3ko8iQVJvAQyaAapFGE61-2FiUS1YGT4RWJi1mVkwbyULFvXqQDsh5pKlqHP9Is0Bo2NkO0CDdCHLZFNu-2FbeC249Fpp6O4UAzRcXVUc-2BHUsWiO-2FgvFCfxW5EgiR25wz3lZsH9JH4NocfAwIdlVNo-2FWEhagHsCUTqMjx7bAoZyWwblJtSqYj75UrWaJ07n5j4rc0lX4BxnW5FZO-2F5joBESMXY9lsX-2FYvOllsf0cBAm9ItJtLlgECokYh7TpBoCSFUsOKzq9WBaHOQn3c-2BEO8n-2BeqtXHrKDMbSYk1-2BBnurwQOjM8eikpI1G3Bny6O72D6dqKGG9zzXOnz3tG7HvpSgyCvQ5P3v15sCrxtcDEXRKZ2b-2BYRlyXqR-2FkYA98vtBzpf1aM629h" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; background: transparent; outline: none;">Yale</a><span> </span>to<span> </span><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/JAE/ni0YAA/t.2f8/I1AXGWBrTSWQTjG7hflBag/h33/yqslwKJf4PvoXxyJHBzdRBAr0Ar-2Bqq22tiNd7KdC-2B47rlpm9uuSFDi9rOWF2R0xaXBrRy1oH7UDgsJY3tGSCFpwZItyV7hhHJn16NUM5NAILIZVdy1YHSAs4RFzUr07RnMakRx-2FAUSoCaw6VPklVOlgKVzgpwye8dYlGpRdBjPv2mLVimFFrBrNAEpcF4NGIPJoL1GpLvobr4ETt6zunXQfdi668rICTJc33cBySPo6vdskbOe8kfLzRfHCSDvluQcDNCcVoV4AzuD0LKhXtJigB8FX1bSV1VwmYzrVa3khj7UIl-2B4QiINb8Q1HMXvuek88mRVBcgbdGtZqVCPAoGiF9biP9E41VJPnjIOGmIFqlyBWP9Io3fL3o9n25q38j9nV76GFCq0NO0rH6HuZ5ZzJ2Ik5tsAYOjpPM3PXlrVd5CoUYjE823x3q3GtjZgPxY1UJKgJwdk-2Bp55TWqhrkcXuMWf86lbbseU-2F4D94lYTk-3D" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1519500890346_15649" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; background: transparent; outline: none;">Cornell</a>.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==https://www.alternet.org/economy/who-owns-puerto-ricos-debt-exactly-weve-tracked-down-10-biggest-vulture-firms === https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-october-4-2017/ the nation mag buy small town newspapers for real estate; rent to paper then downsize jobs, then discard; julie reynoldsking city/ cops tow scam</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">= Michael SheehanThe director of the vulture fund Donegal International likes to be known as Goldfinger, after the James Bond villain, and has a penchant for expensive Cadillacs. Donegal owns a $15m (£9.5m) Zambian debt, dating back to 1979, which was originally purchased from Romania in 1999 for $3m. Once in possession of the debt, Donegal began demands from Zambia, which handed over $2.5m before the firm sued them in the UK for defaulting. The high court awarded Donegal $15.5m in 2007 despite the judge's concerns that Sheehan was "cavalier in presenting his evidence". An experienced lawyer, Sheehan has worked at law firms in Washington DC and Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Incongruously, he spent most of the 1990s as a counsel to a debt relief NGO before setting up Debt Advisory International (DAI), a firm that advises vulture funds. DAI was instrumental in brokering the deal between FG Management in the acquisition of Congolese debt from Bosnia. Peter Grossman Global Development - The Guardian  Is child labour always wrong? The view from Bolivia – podcastKary Stewart looks at why 850,000 children work in Bolivia, and whether the numbers can be vindicated by the country’s unique cultural context ListenA former Morgan Stanley consultant, Grossman is the co-founder of the vulture fund FG Hemisphere, now FG Capital Management. Like Sheehan, Grossman and his now deceased partner Keith Fogerty are trained lawyers and set up an advisory firm for investors in the developing world in the 1990s.Grossman has successfully sued the DRC for $100m after acquiring debts owed to Bosnian state company EnergoInvest for $2.6m. The sale was signed off by the former Bosnian prime minister, Nedzad Brankovic, who has been investigated on corruption charges relating to his tenure at EnergoInvest. FG Management has chased its claim on the DRC's debt around the world's courtrooms, from Hong Kong to the US. Last November in Jersey FG's claim on $108.3m of Congolese money was successful. At present representations are being made to the Jersey government to ensure that this does not happen again. The privy council will meet on 8 December to discuss the issue. Paul Singer Singer is a major donor to the US Republican party and the founder of Elliott Management, which controls about $17bn from its Manhattan offices, including a 17% stake in UK company National Express. Elliott's principle investment strategy is buying distressed debt cheaply and selling it at a profit or suing for full payment. In 1995 it bought defaulted Peruvian bank debt for $20m and successfully sued for $58m.grossman LI Jesse CohnSenior Portfolio Manager & Head of US Equity Activism at Elliott Management Fermin Gutiérrez C.Director en Factoraje Corporativo FG Capital Al BartonePresident Abee-Air Paul SingerPresident at Elliott Capital Advisors, L.P. Rohan Patnaik– James HillManaging Director at Credit Suisse Geoffrey Sorbello Blue Thomas Jim BarkasManaging Director at DAI Offset Finance Paulo GomesChairman, Paulo Gomes & Partners From 1983 to 1987, Mr. Grossman practiced law until he joined the emerging markets team at Shearson Lehman Brothers where he was responsible for its structured transactions around the world. In 1989, Mr. Grossman's group moved to Dillon, Read & Co. where he remained responsible for the group's structured transactions and oversaw investments in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Jamaica. In 1990, the group joined Morgan Stanley to establish its fixed income emerging markets unit. There, Mr. Grossman again had primary responsibility for the group's specialized transactions and for its investments throughout Latin America. In 1993, Mr. Grossman joined Keith Fogerty at Centaur International Corporation. Mr. Grossman and Mr. Fogerty managed Centaur until forming FG Capital Management, Ltd. in 2000. Mr. Grossman received his B.A. in English (Honors) from McGill University and his J.D. (cum laude) from The Cornell University School of Law.Experience Managing DirectorFG Capital Management, Ltd. April 2000  – Present (17 years)FG Capital Management, Ltd. is an investment management firm focused on emerging markets. FG Capital's unique investigative and strategic capabilities have enabled it to capitalize on opportunities in the developing economies that are home to 80 percent of the world's population. Over his near thirty year career in emerging markets, FG's principal Managing Director, Peter Grossman, has designed and executed hundreds of financial transactions, with a particular emphasis on fixed income opportunities. He specializes in special, alternative or distressed investments, particularly those involving litigation, potential litigation, bankruptcy and reorganization or liquidation of exotic investment portfolios. He has also managed a number of more traditional, non-distressed businesses and investments, including an auto financing company in Poland, a steel mill in Bulgaria, a cocoa trading company in Ivory Coast and a litigation financing fund in Brazil. He has also advised sovereign countries on debt-related issues, helping them evaluate and resolve or manage their external debt. Finally, Mr. Grossman has in recent years also overseen in-depth corruption investigations involving a variety of emerging market countries.=wsj Avenue Capital's Investor in ChiefHe's Prescient. He's Well-Connected. Just Don't Call Marc Lasry a 'Vulture'By MIKE SPECTOR Updated March 27, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET Even with just three days remaining before last Sunday's House vote on landmark health-care legislation, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made time for a special lunch guest: Marc Lasry.... == http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829 matt t ...And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.Willard "Mitt" Romney's background in many ways suggests a man who was born to be president – disgustingly rich from birth, raised in prep schools, no early exposure to minorities outside of maids, a powerful daddy to clean up his missteps, and timely exemptions from military service. In Romney's bio there are some eerie early-life similarities to other recent presidential figures. (Is America really ready for another Republican president who was a prep-school cheerleader?) And like other great presidential double-talkers such as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Romney has shown particular aptitude in the area of telling multiple factual versions of his own life story."I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there," he claimed years after the war. To a different audience, he said, "I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam."Like John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, men whose way into power was smoothed by celebrity fathers but who rebelled against their parental legacy as mature politicians, Mitt Romney's career has been both a tribute to and a repudiation of his famous father. George Romney in the 1950s became CEO of American Motors Corp., made a modest fortune betting on energy efficiency in an age of gas guzzlers and ended up serving as governor of the state of Michigan only two generations removed from the Romney clan's tradition of polygamy. For Mitt, who grew up worshipping his tall, craggily handsome, politically moderate father, life was less rocky: Cranbrook prep school in suburban Detroit, followed by Stanford in the Sixties, a missionary term in which he spent two and a half years trying (as he said) to persuade the French to "give up your wine," and Harvard Business School in the Seventies. Then, faced with making a career choice, Mitt chose an odd one: Already married and a father of two, he left Harvard and eschewed both politics and the law to enter the at-the-time unsexy world of financial consulting."When you get out of a place like Harvard, you can do anything – at least in the old days you could," says a prominent corporate lawyer on Wall Street who is familiar with Romney's career. "But he comes out, he not only has a Harvard Business School degree, he's got a national pedigree with his name. He could have done anything – but what does he do? He says, 'I'm going to spend my life loading up distressed companies with debt.' "Romney started off at the Boston Consulting Group, where he showed an aptitude for crunching numbers and glad-handing clients. Then, in 1977, he joined a young entrepreneur named Bill Bain at a firm called Bain & Company, where he worked for six years before being handed the reins of a new firm-within-a-firm called Bain Capital.In Romney's version of the tale, Bain Capital – which evolved into what is today known as a private equity firm – specialized in turning around moribund companies (Romney even wrote a book called Turnaround that complements his other nauseatingly self-complimentary book, No Apology) and helped create the Staples office-supply chain. On the campaign trail, Romney relentlessly trades on his own self-perpetuated reputation as a kind of altruistic rescuer of failing enterprises, never missing an opportunity to use the word "help" or "helped" in his description of what he and Bain did for companies. He might, for instance, describe himself as having been "deeply involved in helping other businesses" or say he "helped create tens of thousands of jobs."The reality is that toward the middle of his career at Bain, Romney made a fateful strategic decision: He moved away from creating companies like Staples through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that involved borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then extracting value from them by force. He decided, as he later put it, that "there's a lot greater risk in a startup than there is in acquiring an existing company." In the Eighties, when Romney made this move, this form of financial piracy became known as a leveraged buyout, and it achieved iconic status thanks to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Gekko's business strategy was essentially identical to the Romney–Bain model, only Gekko called himself a "liberator" of companies instead of a "helper."Here's how Romney would go about "liberating" a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it's called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.Now your troubled firm – let's say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company's bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level."That interest," says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, "just sucks the profit out of the company."Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company's costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees." Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.This business model wasn't really "helping," of course – and it wasn't new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the "bust-out," in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. "It's the bust-out," one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. "That's all it is."Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead. Experian, the giant credit-rating tyrant, was acquired by Bain in the Nineties and went on to become an industry leader.But there's a key difference between private equity firms and the businesses that were America's original industrial cornerstones, like the elder Romney's AMC. Everyone had a stake in the success of those old businesses, which spread prosperity by putting people to work. But even private equity's most enthusiastic adherents have difficulty explaining its benefit to society. Marc Wolpow, a former Bain colleague of Romney's, told reporters during Mitt's first Senate run that Romney erred in trying to sell his business as good for everyone. "I believed he was making a mistake by framing himself as a job creator," said Wolpow. "That was not his or Bain's or the industry's primary objective. The objective of the LBO business is maximizing returns for investors." When it comes to private equity, American workers – not to mention their families and communities – simply don't enter into the equation.... vs ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulture_fund wiki Vulture capitalists are investors that acquire distressed firms in the hopes of making them more profitable so as to ultimately sell them for a profit.[1] Due to their aggressive investing nature, and how they make firms more profitable, vulture capitalists are often criticized.[2]Contents  [hide] 1Distinguishing between venture and vulture capitalists2Criticism3See also4ReferencesDistinguishing between venture and vulture capitalists[edit]A venture capitalist is an investor who provides funding for start-ups, early stage firms and companies with growth potential.[1] These types of firms seek out venture capitalists, as they are too small or too new to have credit profiles, making them ineligible for bank loans and other forms of raising capital.[3]Although risky, venture capitalists invest in firms as there are very lucrative returns on their investments when the company they are investing in is successful.[1][4]Furthermore, venture capitalists will often invest in a range of firms rather than just one or two, in order to mitigate risks if the investments are unsuccessful.[5]On the other hand, vulture capitalists are a type of venture capitalist, which provide a final attempt at gaining funding.[4] Whereas venture capitalists seek firms with growth potential,[1] vulture capitalists usually seek out firms where costs can be cut in order to increase profits. Mostly, these firms are distressed and on the brink ofbankruptcy[4] Due to this reason, vulture capitalists are able to buy these firms at a much lower price than if they had been profitable and expanding.[4]Once the firm is acquired, vulture capitalists can attempt to increase efficiency in order to turn the company around. This is often done by cut-downs costs wherever possible, which in part is likely to be accomplished by firing workers where possible, reducing benefits or both. With reduced costs, the firm becomes profitable or at least raises the probabibilty of this eventually happening, thus raising the share price and the worth of the investors holdings. Lastly, the vulture capitalists sell any equitythey own, making a profit. But vulture capitalists can also choose to divide and sell off the entire company in pieces, if this should increase the attractiveness of each individual piece to its purchaser and thus allow the vuluture capitalist a net profit. [6][7]Criticism[edit]Vulture capitalists receive a lot of criticism as they often go for firms that are in very poor shape,[4] meaning these firms are unable to secure capital from banks or even venture capitalists as they are too risky an investment.[3] Due to this, vulture capitalists are able to acquire the firms for prices that are often very low considering what would they would have been if the company was not currently under pressure, or if other participants were bidding on it.[4]Once vulture capitalists acquire a firm, they often fire workers to reduce costs,[6] in order to raise profitability for their own gain. Vulture capitalists are criticized for this, especially as the newly unemployed people can be said to put pressure on the political economy and general society through their need of unemployment benefits, which in turn comes from government and ultimately all taxpayers.[6] Meanwhile, vulture capitalists pay only 15% tax[6] on their profits. In other words, while vulture capitalists reap the rewards, they can be said to put more pressure on the current social and economic systems.For the same reasons, venture capitalists can be accused of being vulture capitalists, or "vulture" for short, depending on how they conduct their business.[8] In this sense, vulture capitalist is used as a derogatory word for venture capitalists, as the vulture capitalists are considered to be preying on firms in distress for their own profit.[2]See also[edit]</font></p>