DAVOS HOSTS BLACKSTONE CREEPS

 

EASY READING CULTURE OF LIFE NEWS:  DAVOS HOSTS BLACKSTONE CREEPS « Culture of Life News 2

Zimbabwe gave up having money.  We better watch out.  At the rate our gnomes are burning through global wealth, we all might have no ‘money’. Which is probably why gold is now soaring back to its previous highs, already at almost $930 an ounce.  Gold is climbing because the alternative is what?  The threat of devaluation is lighting more than one fire!  We visit Davos, yet again, for a hilarious Schwarzman interview.  This particular gnome finds the losses to be ‘incomprehensible’ even though he, himself, is ‘responsible’.  All we have to do is go back in time to see what I said about him in 2006.  Heh.  Not one kind word, of course.  He didn’t fool me.

 

 

Richest 400 Earn More, Pay Lower Tax Rate – Forbes.com

The 400 highest-earning taxpayers in the U.S. reported a record $105 billion in total adjusted gross income in 2006, but they paid just $18 billion in tax, new Internal Revenue Service figures show. That works out to an average federal income tax bite of 17%–the lowest rate paid by the richest 400 during the 15-year period covered by the IRS statistics. The average federal tax bite on the top 400 was 30% in 1995 and 23% in 2002.

 

Aside from executions, the best way to control the super-rich is to tax them.  Then, there is no reward for ripping off people.  At least, it gets ripped off by the government.  Anyhow, at least the government, if the People are loud, will share the loot in the form of social services.  Now, I know there are people out there who think we don’t need social services.  This is foolish.  They usually are unaware of how surrounded they are by social servicing.  When we go bankrupt, everyone will find out and it will not be a pleasant awakening, that, I can assure everyone.

 

Societies with very rich and very poor and few in between tend to be third world nations. This is no surprise.  In the US, the richer states usually are the ones with the most social services and highest taxes.  Many people move to cheap states but this is a cheat since they are still getting high-tax social services via the Fed that taxes high tax states higher than these low tax states.  But if this dries up, and it will, then harsh reality will emerge.  All those freeways will not be maintained, just for example.

 

Social services are good.  Wild greed at the very top is utterly evil.  Just trust my judgement here.  Or move to Mexico and get a front row seat in ‘anarchy’ and see how that fits.

 

WEF 2009: Global crisis ‘has destroyed 40pc of world wealth’ – Telegraph

Steve Schwarzman, chairman of private equity giant Blackstone, said an “almost incomprehensible” amount of cash had evaporated since the financial crisis took hold. “Business will be very different,” he added.

His comments came on a day of the World Economic Forum characterised by the gloom of its participants and warnings that the crisis will endure for some time. News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch kicked off the meetings by warning that the atmosphere was worsening – despite global economic confidence plumbing the lowest depths on record.

“The crisis is getting worse,” he said. “It’s going to take drastic action to turn it around, if it can be turned around, quickly. I believe it will take a long time.”

Rupert Murdoch has a sinister-sounding name.  So does Schwarzman.  These men of the darkness are directly and personally responsible for the present international collapse.  They both supported and enabled and pushed for the policies and systems that are now destroying world wealth.  So, 40% of it is gone?

 

HAHAHA.  I hate to say this, but I did predict this.  The Derivatives Beast was not defeated, he wasn’t caged. He wasn’t shoved back into the Cave of Wealth and Death.  He is out here, he is eating all the wealth in the world and wont’ stop until it is all gone and he then will burp and vanish in a flash of lightning.  When funny money was used to make wealth without capital profits feeding the systems, we got this present wretched mess.  This mess won’t end until Schwartzman, Murdoch, Madoff, and all the other gangsters are behind bars and all their wealth is confiscated.

 

They set this in motion.  It can’t stop until it utterly destroys them.  The fact that Murdoch and Schwartzman were at Davos shows that these creeps still have enough money to gad about the planet, babbling like idiots. I can’t wait for them to be knocked off the stage.  Sigh.  Let’s go into the past.  Only one and a half years ago, Blackstone launched its IPO.  And it shot up:

 

Blackstone stock jumps on debut – Stocks & economy- msnbc.com

June. 22, 2007

Blackstone Group shares rose 13 percent in their stock market debut Friday as investors scrambled for a piece of the sixth-richest initial public offering in U.S. history.

Chief Executive Stephen Schwarzman now controls a firm whose market value stands at about $40 billion. His personal wealth also skyrocketed, with a 24 percent stake in Blackstone’s management partnership worth around $8 billion, on top of the roughly $449 million he was expected to cash out in the IPO.

For those lucky enough to get in on the IPO — a difficult task since most shares were snapped up by big financial institutions and money managers — the stock barreled past its $31 initial price. The shares closed up $4.06, or 13.1 percent, to $35.06. About 113.1 million shares traded hands — almost the full offering of 133.3 million shares.

 

The first day was the only day this stupid stock made a profit.  From there on forwards, it was all a Grenoble ski jump to penny stock status:

BX: 4.51 +0.01 (0.22%) – The Blackstone Group L.P.

Here is two of my Blackstone stories from over a year ago:

May, 2007:  Money Matters: Schwarzman Claims China Won’t Run Blackstone (hahaha)

The Jewish financier running Blackstone has fallen for the Chinese lure of easy money and is trying to convince us, letting China into all our hedge funds will make us stronger. This is an obvious lie. It does make these guys much richer and they wi

ll happily bribe our politicians to do things that are bad for the USA but good for them and China! And this is how the Chinese will bribe our own government into doing their bidding. This move will piss off Japan no end.

 

November, 2008:  MAJOR GAMBLING DEN IN QUICKSAND « Culture of Life News 1

And look here! A certain very powerful and well-connected former investment bank went into this business head over heels!

Sep 3, 2007 Morgan Stanley Building a Ultra-Luxury Casino in Atlantic City

Major investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse as well as other investment/hedge funds are starting to invest in industries outside of the financial industry. Real Estate for one, has become one of the most popular forms of investment by these firms, look at Blackstone, earlier this year they made the largest private equity purchases to date with the 46billion dollar purchase of Equity Office Properties, and then a few short months later purchasing Hilton Hotels for 26billion dollars. Companies that were once thought untouchable – especially by private capital – are being purchased more and more often – at very attractive numbers for their current shareholders. What does that mean? Private Equity firms, and investment banks do not make large purchases without doing their research. Sure there is a lot of discussion on Blackstone’s payout to their CEO, and the disappointment with their recent IPO – but one thing for sure, Real Estate is the best long term investment, much better than the financial markets, and even the treasury market.

Lately, a new type of “real estate” investment by these investment firms is in Casinos – an industry that was almost completely owned and run by organized crime and frequented by the worst of the worst – casinos have had an amazing resurgence over the past 4 decades or so. Proof of this is the growth of destinations like Las Vegas, and something a little closer to home – Atlantic City.

    HAHAHA. Just what I expected! The übergnomes of Goldman Sachs rushed right into the Cave of Wealth and Death and joyously embraced Lady Luck! And she smiled, showing her fangs, and happily rolled her bone dice. SNAKE EYES. ‘Why did you do that,’ screamed the Goldman Sachs gnomes.

    ’Because it is fun,’ said the eldest and by far, the most dangerous of the goddesses. ‘Want me to roll again?’ She rattled the dice in her palm. ‘How about the Wheel of Fate? I really love Russian Roulette, too.’

 

Like Donald Trump and his part of the Mafioso of finance, Schwartzman saw GoodFellas & Casino with Scorsese and DeNiro

These goodfellers are not Rockefellers.  They are more like future rock pounders, in prison, I hope.  Now, on to more hedge fund bad news [there is no other kind, you know!]:

 

Bloomberg.com: Canada

Fortress Blocks Redemptions as Shareholders Lose 96% Since IPO

One of the thingsWesley Edens did soon after his company bought Canadian ski-resort conglomerateIntrawest Corp. in October 2006 was to finance construction of a $43 million gondola at Whistler, British Columbia…

Two years after commissioning the ski lift, Edens, 47, finds himself staring into an abyss of a different sort. He’s the chief executive officer of money managerFortress Investment Group LLC. Edens and his partners became instant billionaires when the company, which manages $34.3 billion in private equity and hedge fund holdings, went public in 2007. The Montana-born Edens, who ski-raced in high school, could have paid for the gondola himself.

In the past four months the shares of Fortress have lost most of their value, falling 96 percent to $1.34 from $31 on Feb. 9, 2007, their first trading day. “There’s been a lot of hardship in the world since then,” says Edens in a rare interview.

 

 

FIG – Fortress Investment Group LLC – Google Finance

Both stocks were high fliers when launched and both went steadily downwards.  Both were scams.  Both collapsed the same way and on the same time scale.  Both are now penny stocks.  Both lost over 90% of their investment values.  Both are seeing virtually no buying and selling of their stocks for both are worthless.  Let’s go back to when Fortress was launched, my blog, as always, called the shots utterly correctly!

 

November 10, 2006:  Money Matters: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God—Hedge Fund Fun And Games

Let’s look at a case study in this: Fortress (HAHAHAHA) Investment Group, LLC. (LLC: Lots of Lucky Crooks). It is in the news today with a bold program to share the wealth with even more suckers, um, investors. All they have to do is buy a share of this organization that makes money out of thin air or by devastating companies which they cannibalize.

I decided to check out their investments and organization so I visited their web page!

ABOUT FORTRESS

 

Fortress Investment Group LLC is a leading global alternative asset manager with approximately $26 billion in assets under management as of September 30, 2006. Fortress is headquartered in New York and has affiliates with offices in Dallas, San Diego, Toronto, London, Rome, Frankfurt and Sydney.

 

What follows is endless flim-flam that basically says they have a thumb in every plum pie and a spoon in every pot and a finger on every scale. There is lots of babbling about rearranging the landscape and exploiting opportunities.

This web page continues with an explanation about how their fund is structured:

Hedge Funds — a business that manages approximately $9.4 billion of assets under management comprised of two business segments: (i) hybrid hedge funds – which make highly diversified investments globally in undervalued and distressed assets, including loans, assets and corporate securities; and (ii) liquid hedge funds – which invest globally in fixed income, currency, equity and commodity markets and related derivatives to capitalize on imbalances in the financial markets.

 

Publicly Traded Alternative Investment Vehicles, or ‘‘Castles’’ — approximately $3.0 billion of aggregate market capitalization in two publicly traded companies managed by Fortress. The Castles currently invest primarily in real estate and real estate debt investments.

©2003 Fortress Investment Group LLC. All Rights Reserved. Use of this website is governed by the Terms of Use. For information on your privacy, please read our Privacy Statement.
SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Contact: Lilly H. Donohue, Managing Director Fortress Investment Group LLC, (212) 798-6100 ldonohue@fortressinv.com

OK, gang! ‘SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION’????? HAHAHAHA. My god. Talk about blatant! They don’t even bother to put up a real, working web page? It is worse off than my own blog? I am more organized? More informative? Would you give $750 million dollars to a paper pushing organization that can’t even be FUCKING BOTHERED to completely build a working web page? Who is working for them? High school hackers?

If this isn’t the world’s biggest flashing red light, what is?

Sigh. And investing in real estate debts? Translation: they are the idiots who bought up all those mortgages at below-interest rate teasers that were given, no money down, to investors in ticky-tacky condos in Vegas and Miami! And these loans are performing like a comotose patient.

And the ‘capitalizing on imbalances in financial markets’ means they are trying to be vultures like the Bushes who can raise or lower the price of oil by mouthing off at Iran or raise or lower the value of the dollar by throwing up on Prime Ministers. Anyone else playing this game is crazy since they can’t control events nor make events happen! Predicting what will happen next is easy if one is the person acting out events!

For all others, this is the road to destruction.

Here is the former big-time retailer, Crazy Eddie, warning us about Fortress Investments:

November 9th,
2006
9:33 pm
In my travels across our country giving free presentations about white collar crime the buzz word for many accounting students and many current accounting professionals looking towards the future is “forensics.”
Many anti-fraud professionals are biding their time and waiting for the private equity bubble to burst with regards to the trillions of dollars invested in largely unregulated hedge funds with relatively little oversight.
Unfortunately reforms often come too late after billions upon billions of dollars are lost forever.

 

*snip*

Therefore, we must be very careful when large amounts of capital are flowing to entities with relatively little oversight, weak internal controls, and checks and balances.
I hope the there will never be a “bubble to burst.”
However, as a former criminal and ex-felon I know all too well the results of large amounts of money in the hands of those few people without effective regulation, oversight internal controls, and “checks and balances.”
Never say you have not been warned!
Respectfully,
Sam E. Antar
— Posted by Sam E. Antar (Former Crazy Eddie CFO and ex-felon)

He posted on the NYT forums attached to an article about Fortress. He knows a con when he meets one and I do agree with him, this is a 100% con job.

And when it loses all that $28 billion, yes, BILLION, it claims it has, this will hammer world financial markets and I think they don’t really have one billion, much less $28 because they couldn’t pay some poor web master a few bucks to put up a decent, attractive web page. Maybe they will hire me. At least I know how to design decent web pages.

On the other hand, just arrest them all. Sheesh.

 

Back then, some readers thought I was stupid.  HAHAHA.

Money Matters: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God—Hedge Fund Fun And Games

 

wow, you have no idea what you’re talking about

Posted by: anon | December 10, 2006 at 05:37 PM

 

lol…yea you are clueless.

 

Posted by: david | January 23, 2007 at 07:29 PM

 

As always, I get the last laugh. Well, if anyone listened to me, at least they didn’t lose money!  The fact that the crooks launched Fortress while not even having a functional web page: gads!  Even ill-trained teenagers know, you don’t do this! Everyone will make fun of you!  But the media didn’t mention this detail.  I was the only person who did visit the site and mock it.

 

Now: why gold is going up even though most commodities are down or barely moving upwards:

 

BBC NEWS | Africa | Zimbabwe abandons its currency

Zimbabweans will be allowed to conduct business in other currencies, alongside the Zimbabwe dollar, in an effort to stem the country’s runaway inflation.

The announcement was made by acting Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa.

BBC southern Africa correspondent Peter Biles says the Zimbabwean dollar has become a laughing stock. A Z$100 trillion note was recently introduced.

Until now only licensed businesses could accept foreign currencies, although it was common practice.

Eventually, the US might be in this boat.  If we continue to run up epic debts, we certainly will join Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic in the annals of failed governments with failed banks.  Gold didn’t collapse like other stuff this last year.  It rushed to a peak and then fell back by over $250 but it is now leading the way upwards as everyone is counting on inflation re-emerging as the US prints money like mad.  The scheme to have the Treasury sell all our debt to the Federal Reserve seems to have been nipped at the bud by angry Chinese leaders.   But the US can’t help it: we need money so we can spend money.  Just like in Zimbabwe.

 

Cost of shoring up U.S. banks may be in trillions | U.S. | Reuters

The cost of restoring confidence in U.S. financial firms may reach $4 trillion if President Barack Obama moves ahead with a “bad bank” that buys up souring assets.

The figure far exceeds even the most pessimistic estimates of how great the loan losses might be because there is so much uncertainty about default rates, which means the government may need to take on a bigger chunk of bank debt to ease concerns.

Goldman Sachs economists said ideally the public sector would step in to remove the hardest-to-value assets, which would alleviate nagging worries about future losses and hopefully help get lending going again.

“Unfortunately, with an unprecedented meltdown in mortgage credit and a deep recession in the broader economy, there is a great deal of uncertainty about the value of almost every asset,” they wrote in a note to clients.

Well, if this isn’t a ‘buy gold’ signal, I don’t know what is!  Goldman Sachs always lies to the victims it fleeces.  They never learn.  Goldman’s name is a dead give-away!  ‘Gold!’ for crying out loud!  Gold!!!!  Yes, thanks to Goldman Sachs, there is tremendous uncertainty about the value of almost everything…except for gold, of course!  Do they say this?  NO!  HAHAHA.  The gold bugs online can rejoice.  Or beat up the GS gnomes.  

 

They want $4 trillion because they screwed up totally and hideously.  I say, spend a few bucks building holding cells for these clowns who did this to us and then we can start from scratch, with these guys out of the picture forever.  They, on the other hand, want $4 trillion so they can globe trot to Davos and other places and belch out advice that stinks.

 

Lax Regulation Didn’t Cause This Crisis – WSJ.com

The costs and risks of doing business in the U.S. were perceived as being high — and growing — due to taxation and financial regulations such as those concerning corporate governance and market manipulation. Then there are all the antitrust cases and class-action securities lawsuits. Hedge funds, investment banking and private equity increasingly moved to the Old Continent from the U.S. over the last few years.

Nevertheless, some analysts have blamed the current financial crisis in part on U.S. authorities’ supposed tolerance for opaque over-the-counter derivatives that grew like weeds. But if this is the case, then the EU does not look more virtuous than the U.S. According to the Bank for International Settlements, in 2007 the average value of daily transactions in OTC derivatives peaked at nearly $1.7 trillion in Europe, almost three times the figure for the U.S.

Likewise, if overleveraging by U.S. banks was a consequence of regulatory laxity, we should then note that European authorities were no less in thrall of laissez-faire than their American counterparts. Many of the largest and most highly regulated European commercial banks were much more leveraged than those supposedly unregulated American investment banks. Indeed, they were hit by the fire at its very inception, in August 2007.

Aggressive or even predatory lending practices, leading to unsustainable levels of household debt, are often cited as yet another aspect of U.S. regulatory laxity. Whatever the merits of this argument, one should know that in many European countries the ratio of household debt to disposable income is as large or even larger than in the U.S. According to the OECD, this ratio is 107% in Germany and Spain, 134% in Sweden, 135% in the U.S., 141% in Ireland and 159% in the U.K. It reaches as high as 246% in Holland and 260% in Denmark.

Murdoch owns the WSJ.  All my life, the editorial pages has been a nest of vipers.  Often stupid, incapable of predicting the future in any way, shape or form.  But the rest of the paper was excellent and well-researched. Now, the whole thing stinks.  The longer this awful Fox News gnome owns this paper, the worse it will be.

 

By the way, Europe includes Britain in this screed.  And Britain and the US are nearly identical in this collapse.  We did the exact same stupid things except the US has a Senate to corrupt and the British have the House of Lords. And they have a goofy Queen.  We have Madonna.

 

European steelmakers warn U.S. over ‘Buy America’ – Jan. 29, 2009

The European Commission signaled on Thursday it may contest a “Buy America” provision if it is included in the final version of an $825 billion package to kick-start the U.S. economy.

“If a bill is passed which prohibits the sale or purchase of European goods on American territory, that is not something we will stand idly by and ignore,” Commission spokesman Peter Power told a regular news briefing.

Power said the European Union executive, which oversees trade policy for the 27-member bloc, “will be carefully studying the details of the bill before we can say that the U.S. are violating any trade agreement”.

The US has only trade rivals.  No one is our partner.  Until we figure this out, we will continue to be de-industrialized and de-stroyed.

 

Video – CNBC.com  One On One With V.P. Biden

Vice President Joseph Biden discusses the stiumulus, Wall Street bonuses and policy towards China, with CNBC’s John Harwood.

If you watch the Biden video, you can see shape changing at work.  This corporate enabler who loved to be bribed is now morphing into a white-haired revolutionary, calling for an end to the corruption he enabled, himself.  Even calls for people like himself to be arrested.  I agree. Arrest Biden.

 

NEC to Cut 20,000 Jobs – WSJ.com

Japanese electronics giant NEC Corp. said Friday it will cut 20,000 workers world-wide as it tries to stanch widening losses from semiconductors and other businesses that have been hard hit by competition and the global economic slump.

Japan continues down the tubes.  The fake depression will now be quite real again.  

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