Thursday, February 06, 2020

Trump’s Deranged Post-Impeachment Press Conference: A Closer Look


76,160 views
Feb 6, 2020
3.43M subscribers


Seth takes a closer look at the president reeling off a deranged tirade at the White House, where he celebrated his sham impeachment acquittal with his Republican co-conspirators. Subscribe to Late Night: http://bit.ly/LateNightSeth Watch Late Night with Seth Meyers Weeknights 12:35/11:35c on NBC. Get more Late Night with Seth Meyers: http://www.nbc.com/late-night-with-se...

BREAKING! Putin To New Foreign Ambassadors: Mankind Is Coming Closer To ...


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Feb 5, 2020
768K subscribers
Russian President Vladimir Putin received letters of credence from 23 newly-appointed foreign ambassadors. The ceremony was held in the Grand Kremlin Palace’s Alexander Hall.
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Peabody's Improbable History Pt.1| Rocky and Bullwinkle | Videos For Kids

Not just for kids!
1,326 views
Feb 6, 2020

Virus Epidemic Causes Citigroup to Slash Commodity Forecasts


Feb.06 -- Citigroup Inc. slashed its price forecasts for commodities from oil to copper and iron ore as it said the impact of the coronavirus looks much worse than it initially thought. Bloomberg's Alix Steel talks with Ed Morse, the global head of commodities research at Citigroup.

Asset Management: PRIVATE CAPITAL/PRIVATE DEBT MARKETS > Buy-Outs & Property

"Worldwide, pools of private capital, including private equity and private debt, as well as unlisted real-estate and hedge-fund assets, grew by 44% in the five years to the end of 2019, . . . A different way to capture the scale of the private party is to look at the quartet of Wall Street firms that specialise in managing private investments for clients — Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle and KKR.
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BLOGGER NOTE: What appears in this post are selected snippets taken from
Everyone now believes that private markets are better than public ones
EXIT: from low-productivity “sunset” firms
ENTRY:  into more productive “sunrise” firms.
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"Their total managed assets have risen by 76% in the past five years, to $1.3trn.
They have long specialised in buy-outs and property.
More recently they have grown in private-debt markets, too—in total their funds’ credit holdings have hit $470bn. . .
CAUTION: The big concern is that a shift from public to private capital merely swaps one set of agency conflicts (shareholders v company managers) for another (shareholders v private-asset managers).
Venture and buy-out funds on average did better than the S&P 500 index by around 3% a year after fees. The spread around that average is considerable. Investors in the top quartile enjoyed returns that were far higher than in public equity; investors in bottom-quartile funds did a lot worse.
Better returns for investors reflect in large part better operating performance by the firms that most funds invest in.
In the main, the academic literature finds that private-equity and venture-capital funds add value to the firms they own.
> They raise efficiency, revenue growth and profitability.
> The firms have better management habits than entrepreneur- or family-owned firms.
> Buy-outs lead to modest net job losses but big increases in both job creation and destruction. They spur greater efficiency by speeding up exit from low-productivity “sunset” firms and entry into more productive “sunrise” firms.
> VC backing spurs more innovation, patents and speedier product launches.
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Where Yale goes the world follows
Private capital was once a fringe interest. So what changed?
The growth in passive investing has made public markets less comfortable for midsized companies. They are not big or liquid enough to be in baskets of leading stocks, such as the S&P 500 or the FTSE 100, that are tracked by giant low-cost index funds. A generation ago a promising startup would typically go for an IPO within four years. Now the remaining active investors in public markets are less willing to take a punt on small firms.
 
Venture capital (VC), another part of the private universe, is feverish. SoftBank’s Vision Fund, a $100bn private-capital vehicle backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund, has funnelled cash into fashionable, unlisted startups. Other institutions have vied with it to write big cheques for Silicon Valley’s brightest new stars. Already some of these bets have gone awry. . .
The flood of capital into private markets ultimately rests on the belief that they will outperform public ones. There is evidence for this—in the past the best-run private-capital managers have beaten the returns from public markets, even after generous fees. And there are grounds to believe that this was no statistical fluke. Private capital, say its boosters, reduces “agency costs”. These arise wherever somebody (the principal) delegates a task to somebody else (the agent) and their interests conflict. Consider the public markets—no one has a big enough stake to make it worthwhile to monitor firms, which as a result get complacent or indulge in short-term earnings management to the detriment of the long term. Private capital, which is closely held in a few hands, is supposed to get around such agency problems.
Yet every investment craze is liable to overreach, blindness to risk and misallocated capital. Recent converts to the private world, dazzled by the historical returns, may not fully appreciate the hazards

Wednesday, February 05, 2020

Don'tcha Just Wish We Had "Snap Elections" Here??

Romanian Government Falls, Bringing Snap Elections Closer

Updated on

THE NEW GREEN: Avocados

Yeh > Avocados! (Photographer: Eduardo Leal/Bloomberg)
FINANCE
Avocados Are the New Coal for Hedge Funds Chasing Sustainable Cash
Clients are increasingly willing to hold their asset managers to account on climate issues—and the managers are beginning to listen.
Read more > Bloomberg News

Zelensky Calls for a European Army as He Slams EU Leaders’ Response

      Jan 23, 2026 During the EU Summit yesterday, the EU leaders ...