The founders of the LBO industry – KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, TPG, and Bain Capital – are stuck in giant deals that have turned into debt zombies. The outbreak of mega-LBO mania during 2006–2007 reflected a financial market deformation that sowed recklessness across the entire private equity space. And the debt zombies are still out there.
David Stockman: How KKR Stripped The Beds In America’s Largest Hospital Chain With Some Help From Bubbles Ben
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“Bernanke’s maniacal money printing after the Lehman event catalyzed a virtual stampede back into the very same risk-asset classes which had been reduced to smoldering ruins,” David Stockman writes. It produced the craziest junk-bond binge of all times, allowing the mega-buyouts from before the crisis to survive and pay rich fees to the LBO lords.
David Stockman: How The Fed Helped Bushwhack TXU
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David Stockman: The Texas Gas Bubble Massacre
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The $47 billion buyout of TXU was a bet on a truly aberrational price gap between coal and natural gas that couldn’t possibly last, writes David Stockman. “So the largest LBO in history was the ultimate folly of bubble finance.” It generated $1 billion in fees and an “epic $32 billion payday” for shareholders, “including the hedge funds that had front-run the deal.”
David Stockman: Hedge Funds, Haven Of Hit-And-Run Capital For The 1 Percent
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During the 14 years since the LTCM crisis, the Fed’s interest rate repression policies have resulted in an inflation-adjusted return on six-month CDs of exactly 0%, David Stockman writes. It revolutionized the saving and investment habits of the wealthiest households. Unlike hapless savers among the middle class, the rich had an escape route.
David Stockman: Hedge Funds, Prime Brokers, And The Whirligig of Wall Street Finance
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David Stockman: Hedge Funds And The Rule Of Rips And Wrecks
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“At junctures of extreme financial stress, the high level of carry trade funding” that hedge funds use during bubbles “results in violent market reversals,” David Stockman writes. “Wholesale funding evaporates and involuntary asset sales cascade into a bidless abyss.” Hence the collapse of 2000–2003 (45%) and 2008–2009 (55%). Now they’re doing it again.
David Stockman: Hedge Funds And The Regime Of Insider Trading
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“As the Fed transformed Wall Street into a casino,” wrote David Stockman, “arrangements for insider speculation took on massive size,” with “hedge fund footings” soaring from $150 billion in 1990 to $3 trillion by the 2007–2008 peak. Trading books of Wall Street banks grew even more explosively. Together, they formed “the fast money complex.”
David Stockman: Financial Engineering As The ATM Of The Prosperous Classes
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Unlike mortgage equity withdrawal by households, where the cash windfall was distributed across the middle class, corporate equity withdrawal through buybacks, buyouts, and takeovers resulted in cash distributions to the very top of the economic ladder. Financial engineering: the ATM of the prosperous classes!
David Stockman: Bubble Finance Personified
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“The Fed should have been embarrassed by the M&A frenzy,” writes David Stockman. Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, Wall Street’s favorite deal maker, put “the rest of the corporate deal junkies to shame.” But “the poster boy for Greenspan’s first stock market bubble and its sudden, violent demise was a wake-up call that was wholly ignored.”