10 Comments

One wonders whether PE will be the source of the next financial crash?

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Big capitalists love communism. I thought that we all knew this?

Anyway can you come and get your troll thanks.

https://councilestatemedia.substack.com/p/the-working-class-is-not-going-to/comment/40487571

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I am wondering whether quadratic (or exponential) taxes could help. They would put a penalty on big business but favor small and medium businesses. If big business is not profitable anymore the three problems of central planning, subsidies and requisition of surpluses should be solved by the invisible hand of the market.

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The text employs a clever and subtle shift from the (supposedly benevolent) "invisible hand" to the (corrupt and rent-extracting) "invisible hands".

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Drawing an analogy from biology; private equity is like a parasite or perhaps a tumour in the body of the economy. It subverts the flow of nutrients (capital) away from healthy tissues ( productive companies) and seeks only its own growth ( funds under management) rather than the improvements of society as a whole. Perhaps surgery, or an enema, is required?

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I like that analogy Ajay....because it is right.

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I am not so sure that Mark Twain’s comment about ‘land’ holds true today. It was made before the era of the ubiquitous multi-storey building in our urban landscape. Land has a tripartite character: a) as a living substrate on which primary production occurs, b) as a horizontal surface on which all other production and service activities are conducted, c) as a store of wealth, a surrogate for money.

Land is valued in accordance with which of those attributes is most significant. Developers seek to use ( and stretch) society’s land use planning rules to change land’s role from (a)to (b) and place as many storeys as possible on it to generate (c). In this way they actually create more floor space, effectively more ‘land’. Multi-storey development multiplies the quantity of ‘land’ and the wealth that rent seekers can collect from it.

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Good points. But land here, like labour and money, are all encompassing terms...And Polanyi would have included nature in his conception of 'land'...and as we are discovering the planet and its ecosystems have limits...

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Funny you mentioned Toys R US. Came to my mind too as a victim of an LB.

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Carolyn Sissoko thinks of Leveraged Buyouts as the origins of PE...

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