Today I Learned

It may be U.S. plutocrat strategy to weaken political enemies by killing their companies.

Consider Microsoft destroying Nokia and their Linux phones to benefit fellow American companies Apple and Google.

Consider the Destruction of OkCupid as an attack against its liberal-skewed user base.

The best book I've read about private equity is called Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss by Daniel Souleles. It's an ethnography of private equity.

Private equity is the logical extreme of the idea of shareholder value. Companies are bought, stripped for parts, and mined for resources. The money comes from wealthy people and institutional investors like university endowments, pension funds, etc, and some years it is a very high-return investment. Other years, not so much, see the relationship by the University of California and Blackstone as an example in recent years.

The entire investor community is filled with shitbags.

Is there anything that Reagan hasn't fucked?

This is like me taking out a loan to buy a car and then expecting the car to make the payment.

It's even worse than that. Imagine you bought a car from a dealership and were making monthly payments on it. I take a loan to buy your debt from the car dealership, sell your car to pay my loan off, and then expect you to continue making your monthly car payments to me. You file bankruptcy to get out from under the debt, but by then I've pocketed months or years of your car payments and come out with a tidy profit.

And then I do it to hundreds of other people, over and over again, as long as other rich people are willing to loan me money. Which of course they are, because running companies into bankruptcy is incredibly profitable.

Something something road to serfdom.

Well, in theory it's the responsibility of the banks to not make bad loans. If private equity passes on their debt to the company they bought, and then that company goes bankrupt and the private equity walks away free, that's still the bank's problem and they're gonna lose a lot of money. Of course the problem is banks have a pretty bad track record about being disciplined with their loans.

It was illegal, then Reagan changed that.

Elementary my dear billwashere, in one word: money.

People don't notice the leeches, so noone cries out. This enables said private equity leeches to ~~bribe politicians~~ make considerable donations to various political action committees. And believe it or not, politicians like money.

I think that's the natural outcome. that's the emergent behaviour of capitalism.

those with more money have more power and more influence to make the system better for those with money and power.

the rest, like almost all "economics" its just BS to hide that simple fact.

Sometimes teenagers ask me about how the stock market works.

I love explaining shorts, because the reaction is always “how does that even make sense?”

This is enough reasoning to say that capitalism is the single greatest enemy of mankind. The search for endless profit will kill everyone.

Looks like EA is next on the chopping block.

Can I make my house buy itself for me and then "whoopsie, the house can't pay the bills, guess it will file for bankruptcy and hand me a big ol' stack of cash".

2008 called...

That's how landlords work.

Take loan, buy houses, house has to pay back loan via rent, rent is paid for by renter.

Landlord gets house for free, everything paid by renter.

Weird. I heard Tyrion did it, but he did claim he was innocent!