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> When a fire truck fails to deploy in a burning building and four people die, the cause isn’t just mechanical failure. It’s a business model.
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Private equity bought America's essential services
341–350 of 584 posts
Re: Private equity bought America's essential services
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't believe that's ironic. Harvard and other "elite institutions" are the places with massive endowments, not state colleges or anything. Frankly the more I think about it the more it's nothing particularly interesting, just a fractal representation of the privilege of wealth as far as you want to drill down.
Not entirely... U Mich's is ~$20 billion, UVA & OSU are both around $8 billion, UCLA's is ~$5 billion, the Texas + Texas A&M system have nearly $50 billion in AUM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
Lost in the commotion is the chaos that NIL is wreaking on universities and their donation funnels. The donations side of things seems to be rapidly drying up as a revenue source.
Re: Private equity bought America's essential services
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
It provides liquidity to business owners. As a business owner, if you want cash today because you are done with a business. You could go to a bank and get a loan to pay dividends. This is a bad deal for the bank as you have no incentive to operate the business after you cash out the loan. A private equity firm comes in and operates the business on the model that they still keep some of the profits after the loan valu…
That in itself is reasonable. However governments choose to encourage it with tax systems that mean you pay less tax by increasing debt. This is the main thing that breaks capital structure irrelevance: https://moneyterms.co.uk/capital-structure-irrelevance/ > As a business owner, if you want cash today because you are done with a business. You could go to a bank and get a loan to pay dividends. If you are a business…
but then you would need to keep running it, what if you don't want to do that anymore? how do you incentivize someone to keep it going to pay off the debt you just borrowed outside of the llc.
Re: Private equity bought America's essential services
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the tools we use was bought by PE last summer. When it was time to renew our support contract had tripled in price. I use it across 10 projects so our costs went from $200k to $500k. I let our account manager know this was unacceptable but even his hands were tied. Cancelled those contracts and let them know we were retooling with a competing tool and opensource to fill those gaps. The impression I got was we…
In this case, why doesn't someone else see a market opportunity and sell competing tools for less?
Medium / large companies won't take the risk on smaller operations selling a new focused tool unless it's a major pain point. They'll pay more for less risk, assuming the PE-managed company will go out of their way with account management to address all their concerns.
AVGO/Broadcom in some way acts like a big PE firm, rolling up other software companies, integrating them into their huge suite of offerings, ousting the new integrated offering's competing tools from the customers environments and selling the increment, and cutting off smaller customers not willing to subscribe to the huge suite.
Re: Private equity bought America's essential services
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
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It lowered the chances, and in case of getting sick it also massively lowered the chances of getting the worst side-effects, exactly like any other vaccine does. It's a shame that even highly educated populations do not understand a basic fact of immunology.
Yeah what a shame. I never claimed that it didn't lower the chances of side effects.
This is what was claimed.
"You become a dead end to the virus." — Fauci, 2021
This was the reality
"[Vaccines against respiratory viruses produce] decidedly suboptimal protection." — Fauci, Cell Host & Microbe journal article, 2023
"The durability of protection against infection and hence transmission was relatively limited." — Fauci, 2024 congressional testimony
Anybody that questioned the religious dogma that the vaccines were super effective and that healthy people needed to get endless boosters were crucified and in many cases, fired from their jobs for refusing an unnecessary medical procedure.
Re: Private equity bought America's essential services
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been saying pensions should not exist, as they are contradictory to our political system. Some politician 40 years ago can promise everyone the moon, and never force the next generation to figure it out. I'm from Chicago which has a nightmare pension system that's keeping me from ever buying a home in the city I love, because my property tax increases just go to retired people who moved to Florida. I really appr…
I own a house in Chicago and my property taxes are much lower than my friends in the suburbs. I live in a working-class southside neighborhood. The people who are complaining about property taxes for SFUs in the city are people in neighborhoods with skyrocketing home values. Those people stand to receive a massive windfall when they sell. And while it may be annoying for them if they find themselves having to sell wh…
Nah. I own a property in the gold coast area, and my property values have barely changed in the last 20 years. I only see an insane increase in real estate taxes and assessments. These are the things that price renters out, plus the Chicago housing regulations that leave the landlords without any leverage under pretty much any circumstances and force the risk to be reflected in the rent.
Currently net profit from rental properties in that area is close to the interest on the equivalent amount of 10y bonds, without all the headache.
Re: Private equity bought America's essential services
#347The irony is that PEs exist largely because of pension funds. So to sum it up (not so nicely) we are transferring value from our current standard of living to pay for retirement checks for our old folks. Pensions fund a significant part of PE and they do so because they need around a 7% return in order to look solvent. If they do not have the higher PE returns, they basically go out if cash in 10 years and everyone w…
The stuff that old people need in their retirements to live is getting more expensive due to the types of shenanigans that PE firms are doing. So their pensions appear solvent now but when those old folks actually retire, their money won't go as far? Doesn't add up. I think the people who are really benefitting here are the usual suspects - the ultra rich, and the PE guys at the top doing this transfer really are evil.
Re: Private equity bought America's essential services
#348Again, we have broken higher risk, higher reward. If you just keep gutting companies with leveraged buyouts, you're not taking on any real risk. If you're buying up firms that deliver "essential services", you're likely engaging a monopoly. Again, low risk, high reward. A direct violation of the rules of how investments should work. Regulate the monopoly and this goes away.
Do you think losing the equity portion of the investment means no risk? It's not fully debt financed. And that debt financing bears an interest proportional to the riskiness of the asset's cashflows. There are lots to hate about LBOs but they aren't entirely devoid of value
> Do you think losing the equity portion of the investment means no risk? It's not fully debt financed.
To quote the bandana-clad bard of Venice, CA, Mike Muir: "it's the difference between a Porsche and a Rolls Royce".
If you're playing the LBO game at the level where you're looking at buying up chunks of a community's essential services, you are unlikely to be doing business in a way that presents meaningful risk to your personal financial situation.
Re: Private equity bought America's essential services
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a difference in terms of outcomes? In the final form of a complete 'free market' without a government, the biggest entity would simply replicate the same levers of power that a government has through private militias, issuing scrip, having their own private courts and so on. But, since the US has a powerful government, it's much cheaper, simpler and more stable for them to just buy out as much of it as possi…
I had the pleasure of growing up around gray markets (relatively free, bribes were predictable & reasonable enough for an average noodle seller) in Southeast Asia in the 90s. It's quite different from large corporations getting Federal agencies and municipalities to lock out any potential competition. The enforcement of the US govt is far stronger than the enforcement of a handful of corrupt cops, as each precinct is…
I'll say that I don't know anything about 90s SEA, but I know a bit about gray markets. One thing that stands out to me in your description is that all the corruption is incredibly localized and small-scale. Everything happens at the scale of individuals. And I don't deny that living under these conditions won't be that bad (a single corrupt official's power can only go so far), but what's stopping it from eventually becoming more organized? With us encouraging endless growth of wealth and influence, corrupt individuals are bound to form groups, then rings, then whole organizations. To me, what you're describing seems like a transitory state caused by societal factors, instability and simply not having had enough time. What the thread is all about is end states. We're already in a place where removing government regulation would turn our biggest players into those same cops, except with trillions of dollars, offices in every country and an ability to get their hands onto anything that money can buy.
Re: Private equity bought America's essential services
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
“ In principle, I don't think there's anything wrong with this. All investment expects a ROI over some time horizon” Huh? Why is there nothing wrong? Yes they wouldn’t make the investment if they didn’t think they had a way to get ROI, but how does that entitle them to one at any cost or make it necessarily moral? As an extreme example, If I invest to create a company that is clearly exploitive and addictive, nothing…
Bringing morality into it opens a whole can of worms that I don't think we have the tools to answer. My view is companies don't have a conscience, and any expectation that they are going to independently act with moral righteousness is unrealistic. Any perceived conscience is either for marketing (green/pinkwashing), or the sum of the morals of their owners multiplied by their willingness to exert any moral authority…
That is a baffling response, no one suggested corporations have consciousness.
The poster said “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this” are they a corporation? If they are, apparently they do have consciousness because they say “I think”
And yes some people do in fact try to vote with their dollars. Canadians are doing it plenty right now for an easy example.
That companies’ sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value, usually near term, is basically a toxic social construct and fairly recent. It’s not grounded in anything other than greed.