j**4
发帖数: 10425 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 NewYork 讨论区 】
发信人: ja94 (世上最幸福的人-- taliban的妻子), 信区: NewYork
标 题: for all u chinese who think u are "upper class"...
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Mon Sep 17 11:57:15 2012, 美东)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-tr
Romney started off at the Boston Consulting Group, where he showed an
aptitude for crunching numbers and glad-handing clients. Then, in 1977, he
joined a young entrepreneur named Bill Bain at a firm called Bain & Company,
where he worked for six years before being handed the reins of a new firm-
within-a-firm called Bain Capital.
In Romney's version of the tale, Bain Capital – which evolved into what is
today known as a private equity firm – specialized in turning around
moribund companies (Romney even wrote a book called Turnaround that
complements his other nauseatingly self-complimentary book, No Apology) and
helped create the Staples office-supply chain. On the campaign trail, Romney
relentlessly trades on his own self-perpetuated reputation as a kind of
altruistic rescuer of failing enterprises, never missing an opportunity to
use the word "help" or "helped" in his description of what he and Bain did
for companies. He might, for instance, describe himself as having been "
deeply involved in helping other businesses" or say he "helped create tens
of thousands of jobs."
The reality is that toward the middle of his career at Bain, Romney made a
fateful strategic decision: He moved away from creating companies like
Staples through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that
involved borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then
extracting value from them by force. He decided, as he later put it, that "
there's a lot greater risk in a startup than there is in acquiring an
existing company." In the Eighties, when Romney made this move, this form of
financial piracy became known as a leveraged buyout, and it achieved iconic
status thanks to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Gekko's business strategy was
essentially identical to the Romney–Bain model, only Gekko called himself
a "liberator" of companies instead of a "helper."
Here's how Romney would go about "liberating" a company: A private equity
firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash
flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs
to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing
. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.)
The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake
in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is
done without the consent of the target, it's called a hostile takeover; such
thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most
notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis
Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at
the Gate.
Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the
cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management
with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math.
So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20
million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to
take over a controlling stake.
But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it'
s the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.
Now your troubled firm – let's say you make tricycles in Alabama – has
been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as
little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever
problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350
million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company's bottom line is
suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just
to get your costs down to a manageable level.
"That interest," says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities
and Exchange Commission, "just sucks the profit out of the company."
Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help
tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company'
s costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your
company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee,
typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic
new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens
of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees."
Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by
promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain
inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the
hourly workforce.
Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can
fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to
Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge
profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of
all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory
towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most
rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get
their cash out before a target goes belly up.
This business model wasn't really "helping," of course – and it wasn't new.
Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the "bust-out," in which
a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then
monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit
line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.)
When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and
collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the
leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business
model. "It's the bust-out," one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. "That'
s all it is." | i*****0
发帖数: 2327 | 2 摇滚乐杂志评论政治，结果总是 Grateful Dead。 |
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