As the old adage goes, things have an annoying habit of occurring in threes. It’s particularly true in the case of crises, which tend to fuel each other in a potentially lethal feedback loop. And Mexico is already experiencing blowback from two separate but strongly interlinked crises.
Read more...Yves here. Naked Capitalism contributor Andrew Dittmer, perhaps best known for his series on libertarianism (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and his responses to reader comments) has returned from his overlong hiatus to interview the authors of the highly respected new book, Private Equity at Work.
Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt have produced a comprehensive, meticulously researched, scrupulously fairminded, and therefore even more devastating assessment of how the private equity industry operates, including its deal and tax structuring methods, its impact on employment, and whether its returns are all they are purported to be. Their work was reviewed in the New York Review of Books; we also discussed it in this post.
Earlier this year, Andrew spoke with Appelbaum and Batt, and the first part of their discussion covers the problematic relationship between private equity funds (general partners) and their investors (limited partners) and how private equity affects other businesses.
Read more...Dean Baker, everyone’s favorite progressive economist (mine, too), has an interesting take on our unemployment problem.
Read more...Yves here. Financiers and their media amplifiers keep trying to blame their bad conduct, like mortgage appraisal fraud, on powerless customers, so people like Bill Black have to keep swatting down their misrepresentations. Sadly, this crisis topic is back all too soon due to lack of regulatory vigilance.
Read more...Watching the Eurozone limp along has proven to be an instructive exercise in how long political and financial legerdemain can keep a fundamentally untenable situation going beyond its sell-by date. But a wild card is that right-wing parties in Italy that have realistic odds of eventually governing are pumping for a Eurozone exit.
Read more...Yves here. Hospitals have become yet another example of looting by the administrative classes. Roy Poses explains the result is ever-rising executive pay even when financial results often deteriorate. The next phase of their misrule will be to implement further cost cuts (not including their pay, mind you), with the almost-certain result that standards of care will fall.
Read more...CalPERS’ decision earlier this year to exit all hedge fund investments turns out to have been a particularly visible manifestation of a trend underway: that of investor dissatisfaction with hedge funds. CalPERS politely attributed its withdrawal to excessive fees, too much complexity, and the difficulty of finding funds where it could put a meaningful amount of money to work. The latter point gets at the real problem: hedge funds have underperformed and investors are less and less willing to pay big fees for lousy results.
A Bloomberg story revealed that a marked uptick in the number of hedge funds closures this year.
Read more...Opec’s decision to leave its output ceiling of 30m barrels a day unchanged on Thursday has sent crude prices into a tailspin. Under normal conditions, falling oil prices would be a favorable macroeconomic development, but under current circumstances this is making the job harder for central bankers who struggle to deliver on their inflation targets.
Read more...Yves here. Gaius Publius describes how an increasingly uppity faction within the Democratic party is revolting against the way that the party has become largely indistinguishable from the Republicans on economic matters. Oh, they make more middle class friendly noises, but as Lambert puts it, “The Republicans let you know they plan to knife you in the face. The Democrats tell you they only want one kidney. What they don’t tell you is next year they are coming for the other kidney.”
But can this “Open Rebellion Caucus” make headway when the Democratic party has moved to significant central control of funding?
Read more...Yves here. Some readers took issue with our view that the Saudis, and now OPEC, decision against curbing production to support oil prices, was a classic example of predatory pricing, in which a player produces at an uneconomical cost in order to inflict damage on competitors, force them to curtail operations on a permanent basis, and then harvest higher returns later via having thinned out suppliers. As the post below indicates, it’s now increasingly recognized that the Saudis want oil prices lower, and a big reason is to weaken US shale operators (we also suggested that the Saudis also have geopolitical aims for this move, since the countries that get whacked have either been unfriended by Riyadh or are official enemies).
Analysts have taken almost entirely to discussing the Saudi “fiscal breakeven” which is the oil price it needs to raise enough revenues to funds its government, at $90 a barrel, to contend that the Saudi’s can’t afford to allow prices to remain low for all that long. But the desert kingdom has a lot of unused borrowing capacity and clearly does not see its near-term budget issues as a driving consideration. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, based on a Citigroup analysis that has been making the rounds, argues that the Saudis have misread US shale economics and also contends that many producers have hedged their output, insulating them from the downdraft. Despite its detail, the Citigroup analysis diverges in so many respects from other accounts that I’d like to see more corroboration (recall Goldman’s similarly celebrated forecast that oil was going to over $200 a barrel).
Read more...I hate Wordpress. It destroyed a ton of good work tonight.
Read more...Yves here. Obama’s plan to give 4 million illegal immigrants temporary suspension from deportation has amped up the intensity of the already-heated debate over immigration and competition for US jobs from foreign workers.
This Real News Network interview with Bill Barry, who has organized documented and undocumented workers in the textile industry, makes an argument at a high level that many will find hard to dispute: that the fight over immigration reform and the status of undocumented immigrants diverts energy and attention from the ways in which a super-rich class is taking more and more out of the economy, to the detriment of laborers.
Read more...
