Overfunded pension plans, unencumbered manufacturing/industrial assets, and of course unencumbered real estate. Anything you can loot or borrow against.
The whole thing is basically the restaurant scam from Goodfellas.
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Late stage capitalism. It will hit Amazon in a few years.
Got it.
Blue Star Airlines in Wall Street.
No fucking way. Jeff Bezos comes from finance and is a straight up fire breathing dragon. Plus the valuation on Amazon is way too high (and will remain way too high) to be vulnerable to those types of shenanigans.
Jeff Bezos is the one who knocks. I pity anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to even consider knocking on that door. He’d ruin your life pretty much immediately.
Why would the old owners sell their company to you rather than just borrowing the money, giving it to themselves, and keeping the company? Makes no sense.
And yet it happens every day
It does not. You can tell because the story makes no sense.
This makes much more sense. Now ask yourself… as an unsavory corporate raider, couldn’t you make even more money if, rather than making bad decisions that harm long-term value (and hoping that your buyer (either another PE fund or a company in the same line of business) doesn’t notice), you made decisions that improved long-term value instead? Or at least had a chance to make the business more valuable? You would still screw the pensions to the extent you can, and plan to walk away in bankruptcy if it doesn’t pan out, but it seems logical to try and make the business more valuable than you paid for it, since you own it.
But why waste your time managing a company when you can gut it for a near-instant return and then move on to the next one?
GWS’s description is pretty accurate:
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Because the owners have personal connections with their employees and business partners who gave their blood, sweat and tears helping them build the company, and they would feel bad being the ones to do the fucking over. Even beyond feelings, they should legitimately feel a little scared that the people they betrayed would physically harm them.
So they sell their business, take a fraction “of the everyone is getting fucked” premium in the valuation, and let the Vulture Capital mercenaries do dirty work after they skipped town. If anyone ever asks them about it they say hey, I just wanted to retire/move on to a new chapter in my life, had no idea the Vulture Capitalists would be so ruthless, shrug…
The point is that everyone’s life will be ruined, not that someone in particular is going to ruin Jeff Bezos’ life. That’s what people are talking about with late stage capitalism. It’s not a celebration of increasing efficiency and ability to satisfy consumer demand.
I’m not so sure of that.
This is an event without comparison in modern times.
Pretty much any industry that deals with leisure activity is completely fucked. Travel, theater, restaurants, sports. These companies can’t just afford to keep staff that won’t be doing anything.
Even if owners of airlines and restaurant chains, etc. get some kind of bail out money, then what? They still won’t pay workers they have no use for. I don’t see how unemployment doesn’t rise rapidly on account of this.
Also the worst of this virus hasn’t hit here.
There are a ton of nursing home and similar places in the US where the staff doesn’t get paid nearly enough, so many of them have to work at multiple places. Not a good strategy for trying to contain this thing.
All while we have a complete fucking moron in the White House.
I think the worst of this is far from over in the stock market, and doubly so for the economic well being of the country at large.
Easier said than done.
Not exactly the strategy, but close enough and I dug this up:
Spock: The thing that confused me was the power utilisation curve. It made them seem more powerful than a starship or anything known to us. That ship was constructed for a suicide mission. Since they never intended to return to their home base, they could use one hundred percent power on their attacks. The thing I don’t understand is why I didn’t think of it earlier.
Ask Mitt Romney. From what I understand, that’s how he got his money. At least the money that didn’t come from daddy.
I once worked for a healthy and strong grocery chain that got bought and looted and eventually went bankrupt. With the extra bonus of union busting included.
Bob,
You’re aware the real world exists, right? How’s ToysRUs doing?
Here’s a potential fallout from novel coronavirus that isn’t being discussed much… Basically everyone is going to work from home for 2-8 weeks, right? 90% of companies will experience a large degree of it. They’ve resisted letting employees do it on a large scale before, but there’s a non-zero chance that they see that the change in productivity isn’t too bad, which means they could potentially scale down physical locations, lower their overhead, and become more profitable.
If this is the case, corporate real estate, office buildings, etc would get hammered.
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The shutdowns will have a pretty well-known duration of about two months. You just have to provide cheap/free liquidity to these businesses, and require them to still pay their workers. Give them repayment terms that give them 3 years, 5 years, whatever you need to do, to pay it back… Thus spreading the hit out for the business over a long period of time and allowing them to borrow at no cost to cover it, as long as they keep paying their employees.
I feel like Congress can figure this out and agree on it, but maybe that’s LOL me.
I agree that we haven’t hit the bottom, I expect a recession, I could easily see it being a very slow recovery… I just don’t think the two month pause on restaurants, bars, travel, etc is what’s going to be the underlying cause of it, even if it’s the trigger event.
But obviously there is a ton of volatility now and a lot of possibilities are in play. So what I’m really getting at is what the most likely range of outcomes is.
I think this is really interesting.
I am going to try and counter this theory by watching Netflix the entire time I’m at home so work knows they need me in the office if they want results.
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Just got an email saying the network is slow because too many people are watching Netflix on their work computers at home. I’m pretty pro labor but that should just be an insta-fire.
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Small organization? My Fortune 500 company just blocks pages like Netflix, we couldn’t access it via the corporate network even if we tried.