carried interest

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Mastering Private Equity by Zeisberger, Claudia,Prahl, Michael,White, Bowen, Michael Prahl, Bowen White

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, book value, business process, buy low sell high, capital controls, carbon credits, carried interest, clean tech, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, currency risk, deal flow, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, fixed income, high net worth, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, junk bonds, Lean Startup, low interest rates, market clearing, Michael Milken, passive investing, pattern recognition, performance metric, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, time value of money, transaction costs, two and twenty

Proceeds shared with the GP in the third and fourth step are referred to as a GP’s carried interest (or profit share)—the key incentive for PE professionals—and is most frequently set at a 20% share of a fund’s net profits. An example of the generic language defining the steps in a distribution waterfall is set out in Exhibit 16.2.3 It should be noted that venture funds typically do not have a hurdle rate. Exhibit 16.2 Distribution Waterfall and Carried Interest CARRIED INTEREST: PE funds employ two common methodologies that determine when a GP is entitled to carried interest: all capital first carry and deal-by-deal carry with loss carry-forward.

The fee structure in PE is commonly referred to as “2 and 20” and defines how a fund’s investment manager and GP—and in turn its PE professionals—are compensated: the “2%” refers to the management fee paid by the LPs per annum to a fund’s investment manager while the “20” represents the percentage of net fund profits—referred to as carried interest or “carry”—paid to its GP. The clear majority of profits, 80%, generated by a fund is distributed pro rata to a fund’s LPs. As long as carried interest remains the main economic incentive for PE professionals, their focus will continue to be on maximizing returns, which in turn benefits the LPs. Exhibit 1.7 visualizes the flow of fees and share of net profits to the entities involved in a PE fund. Exhibit 1.7 PE Fees and Carried Interest Returns in PE are typically measured in both internal rate of return and multiples of money invested.19 Given a fund’s cost structure, its net return—that is, the return on capital generated by the fund net of management fees and carried interest—is the relevant metric for its investors and LPs will ultimately define success on that basis at the end of the fund’s life.

These offsets reduce the fee burden for LPs and shift a portion of the fee-based compensation from the GP to the limited partnership as a whole. CARRIED INTEREST: Proceeds from successful exits are distributed to a fund’s LPs and its GP in line with a distribution “waterfall” set out in a fund’s LPA.22 Carried interest is the share of a fund’s net profits paid to its GP—typically 20%—and serves as the main incentive for a PE firm’s principals. In a typical distribution waterfall, PE funds will return all invested capital and provide a minimum return to investors—a fund’s hurdle rate23 or preferred return—before any carried interest is paid out to the GP. After the hurdle rate has been reached, PE funds will typically include a “catch-up” mechanism that provides distributions to the GP until it has received 20% of all net profits paid out up to this point.


pages: 274 words: 81,008

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

Those other industries, both of which are well-represented in Washington, did in fact initially give the private equity industry cover and ultimately helped delay any action on carried interest by the Congress. The emergence of a vocal Republican faction that had literally sworn not to raise taxes also helped stave off any changes. The bigger story around carried interest for private equity, though, may be what might be considered the political opportunity cost. The decision to make carried interest tax such a major issue right out of the gate meant that “Don’t you dare raise taxes on us billionaires” became the defining issue for an industry.

During the election year of 2008, little happened, and as the credit crisis dominated the headlines and talk turned to massive bailouts and Lehman-sized bankruptcies, private equity inched further out of the spotlight. With Obama’s arrival in early 2009, the industry assumed it was mostly a matter of when, not if treatment of carried interest would change. Talk began to bubble about cutting a deal, specifically a “blended” rate that would raise the taxes on some portion of carried interest, or peg a rate somewhere between capital gains and ordinary income. The debate over health care reform served to sideline the issue once again, and while there was some talk of using carried interest as a way to pay for Obama’s health plan, the architects of that legislation ultimately decided not to use any non-health care revenue as sources of money.

What appeared to be the final push came in the spring of 2010, when Baucus called representatives of the private equity real estate, hedge fund, and venture capital industries and said he was planning to use carried interest as a revenue generator that year. He and Levin negotiated a deal whereby 75 percent of carried interest would be treated as ordinary income, with the balance taxed as capital gains. What ultimately helped undo that effort–along with a growing anti-tax sentiment promoted by the Tea Party–was an element, shorthanded as the “enterprise tax,” that was designed to prevent private-equity executives from moving their carried interest into the firm itself and paying the lower rate when they eventually sold their interest in the firm (aka the enterprise).


pages: 340 words: 100,151

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

This economic incentive drives the behavior on the part of the GP that we see in most portfolio companies; that is, paying a GP to sit on the board is very unusual (other than post-IPO, where compensation is par for the course). Carried Interest The heart of compensation for GPs (at least for those who are successful investors) is carried interest. It’s rumored that the term “carried interest” derives from medieval traders who carried cargo on their ships that belonged to others. As financial compensation for the journey, the traders were entitled to 20 percent of the profits on the cargo. That sounds very civilized, if not rich. I’ve also heard—although my Google search is failing me now—that the carry portion of carried interest referred to the fact that the traders were allowed to keep as profit whatever portion of the cargo they could literally “carry” off the ship of their own volition.

I’ve also heard—although my Google search is failing me now—that the carry portion of carried interest referred to the fact that the traders were allowed to keep as profit whatever portion of the cargo they could literally “carry” off the ship of their own volition. I prefer that story. Regardless of its historical origins, carried interest in the VC context refers to the portion of the profits that the GP generates on her investments and that she is entitled to keep. As with the management fee, the actual amount of carried interest varies among venture funds but often ranges between 20 and 30 percent of the profits. As it turns out, how we define “profits” and how and when the GP decides to distribute those profits to herself and her LPs is a matter for negotiation in the LPA.

To account for this, some LPAs introduce the concept of a “hurdle rate” into the profits calculations. A hurdle rate says that unless the fund generates a return in excess of the hurdle rate (this is a negotiated number, but often around 8 percent), the GP is not entitled to take her carried interest on the profits. If the fund exceeds the hurdle rate, then the GP can start collecting her carried interest as if the hurdle rate didn’t exist. So, as long as you clear the bar, you are good; fall short and you get nothing. A “preferred return” is another mechanism to accomplish this, but it is more LP favorable. Unlike the “clear the bar and take the money” aspect of a hurdle rate, a preferred return doesn’t just fall away when you clear it.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

“They got what they paid for,” said Leo Hindery, who leads InterMedia, a private equity group, but opposed the carried interest loophole. In line with this theory, the Nation magazine noted that James Simons gave the maximum to Schumer’s committee around the time that the carried interest issue was before the Senate. The quid pro quo view surely explains the motives of some hedge fund and private equity donors, both in 2007 and afterward, and it fits with Schumer’s reputation as a willing handmaiden of Wall Street. At the same time, hedge fund donors started to favor Democrats by a large margin in 2000, well before the carried interest loophole emerged as an issue or Schumer headed up the DSCC.

Another populist, James Webb, also got c02.indd 49 5/11/10 8:51:58 AM 50 fortunes of change big cash infusions from the DSCC to win an expensive Senate race in 2006. Both Brown and Webb voted against the carried interest loophole. Hedge funds and private equity firms paid for a huge lobbying push to hold onto their tax perks in 2007. The single biggest contract for Washington lobbying that year was a $3.7 million agreement that the Blackstone Group signed with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide—with the goal of derailing the carried interest tax hike. It made sense that Blackstone would spend so much, given that its partners stood to lose many millions of dollars if the tax hike went through.

Nobody has done more in recent years to rope wealthy financiers into the Democratic Party. And, by many accounts, Wall Street got what it paid for. Schumer has taken Wall Street’s side again and again on key battles and has c02.indd 43 5/11/10 8:51:56 AM 44 fortunes of change convinced Senate colleagues to do the same. He has defended the tax loophole on carried interest income for hedge funds and private equity firms, has sought to cut the fees that Wall Street pays to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and has tried to block stricter oversight of the credit agencies that rate Wall Street debt. In a 2009 interview with the New York Times, John Bogle, the founder of the mutual fund colossus Vanguard Group, said about Schumer, “He is serving the parochial interest of a very small group of financial people, bankers, investment bankers, fund managers, private equity firms, rather than serving the general public.”3 Thanks to friends like Schumer, Wall Street was allowed to blow itself up— and take the economy with it—after an era of risky and unrestrained financial engineering.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

“These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”13 One smart line of investment that the hedge fund guys make every year is their contribution to members of Congress. The politicians, in turn, serve their funders by protecting the carried-interest preference from all challengers. Despite its unpopularity, this particular tax break has proven so hard to eliminate that Barack Obama sought to circumvent it instead: he proposed to keep the carried-interest provision but to add a new requirement—it’s been dubbed the Buffett Rule—that says anybody with adjusted gross income over $1 million must pay at least 30% of it in income tax. It was this presidential initiative that prompted the financier Stephen Schwarzman to evoke the Nazis: “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Romney conceded that he had accounts in the Cayman Islands but said this was not for tax purposes. To which the attorney Frank Schuchat responded, “To say you put money in the Caymans, but not for tax purposes, is like saying you bought a condom, but not for sex.” The carried-interest tax break is one of those things that make the United States exceptional when it comes to tax policy. “Most other countries would never think of a dodge like ‘carried interest,’” notes the tax expert Richard Bird. “It’s proof—as if any more proof were needed—that big money gets its way in the U.S. Congress.” And this mammoth tax gift to the richest Americans is one of the reasons that the problem of inequality is so much “more pronounced” in the United States than in other developed democracies.

Whether or not the preferential rate makes sense for investors who risk their capital in the markets, it is much harder to justify the special-case capital gains preference that gives investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and other salaried workers in the financial industry a generous tax break not available to employees in any other field. This giveaway is known as the “carried interest” rule; the name evokes a time when a clipper ship captain held a financial interest in the cargo he carried across the sea. It says that a broker or banker who invests other people’s money can count his own salary as “capital gains” and thus pay tax on it at the reduced, capital gains rate. Some of the biggest earners in the nation take advantage of this provision every year to save tens of millions of dollars in federal income tax.


Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

In recent years, the private equity industry compensation vehicle of carried interest (the profit share paid to the manager for performance) has also been the subject of much scrutiny. As a complex tax issue, carried interest has often been described as the primary means by which asset managers—including both private equity managers and hedge fund portfolio managers—rake in large amounts of compensation.27 Because carried interest and performance fees represent the majority of the large sums earned by the top-performing independent asset managers, the taxation of carried interest has become a controversial political issue.

As a complex tax issue, carried interest has often been described as the primary means by which asset managers—including both private equity managers and hedge fund portfolio managers—rake in large amounts of compensation.27 Because carried interest and performance fees represent the majority of the large sums earned by the top-performing independent asset managers, the taxation of carried interest has become a controversial political issue. Currently in the United States, carried interest has been defined as a capital gain for individuals receiving these payments, and as such it has been subject to materially lower capital gains tax rates. Supporters of characterizing carried interest as a capital gain argue that this policy encourages productive investment and economic growth. Detractors point to relative tax burdens and the undermining of a progressive taxation system. Whatever the relative merits of these positions, it is indisputable that carried interest and its capital gains treatment are certainly contributing to the rise and continued financial success of this new elite.

In public environments, these incentives are sometimes structured as stock options for management teams to earn money when the stock performs well. In private equity environments, these incentives are structured as carried interest, a portion of the profits of the partnership that goes to the manager. However, the future of investment must contemplate how some of these arrangements can distort behavior. Might the carried-interest feature cause certain stewards to treat it like a call option and invest in circumstances that are “heads I win, tails you lose”? Might there be opportunities for making corporate boards more shareholder friendly and reducing some cases of corporate abuses?


pages: 253 words: 65,834

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

But the potential for really big money lies in the “carried interest,” that is, the percentage of profits—usually in the 20 to 25 percent range—that a VC fund earns if their fund performs well. So what’s the VC business model? Raise a fund, get paid 2 to 2.5 percent annually in fees to manage that fund, cover salaries and expenses, and make investments that you hope will generate large capital gains. When those returns are actually generated (e.g., because the portfolio company has a successful sale or IPO), the VC funds typically get their carried interest in the capital gains. Let’s walk through a typical example to see how carry is calculated.

Let’s say there’s a $150 million fund with three general partners with 2 percent in annual fees and 20 percent in carried interest. The firm takes in $3 million in annual revenue and after paying for rent, support staff, associates, travel, et cetera, the three partners might take $400,000 to $500,000 each in salary. If the fund returns two times the capital, or $300 million, over the ten-year life of the fund, then $150 million is considered capital gains. The VCs get 20 percent of that amount, or $30 million in carry, to be divided up between the partners according to who has how much of the carried interest (a very sensitive division, the implications of which I’ll cover in a moment).

Note that associates and principals don’t typically have carry. Junior partners with small slivers of carry (perhaps having one or two of the twenty “carry points”) are usually supervised by senior partners who closely oversee the diligence and decision-making process. If the partners themselves are not on an equal footing in terms of carried interest, an individual partner may not be able to “speak for the firm” when it’s time to make tough decisions about follow-on rounds and M&A transactions. Even the most senior partners within a firm still need to get to consensus across the partnership. That said, when your “deal champion” (i.e., the investment professional that is advocating your case within the partnership) is a subordinate within the VC firm, it can be a harder and longer process than when the deal champion is one of the senior partners.


pages: 421 words: 128,094

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone by David Carey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Future Shock, Gordon Gekko, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, risk tolerance, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, éminence grise

Even so, the general partner collects the full 1.5 percent from the limited partners every year no matter how much of the money has been put to work. When the funds themselves begin to wind down after five or six years, the management fee is substantially reduced.) Richer yet was the potential bonanza Blackstone stood to make in “carried interest.” By the conventions of the business, private equity firms take 20 percent of any gains on the investments when they are sold. If Blackstone raised the hoped-for $1 billion and the fund averaged $250 million in profits a year (a 25 percent return) for five years running—a not impossible mark—Blackstone would be entitled to $50 million a year, or $250 million over five years.

A more lucrative compensation scheme was hard to imagine. The fee structure ensured that if the fund was big enough, the financiers would become millionaires even if they never made a dime for their investors. The management fees alone guaranteed that with a large fund. If they made good investments and collected their 20 percent carried interest, they stood to make a lot more. While the individual partners at a successful midsized firm such as Gibbons, Green, or van Amerongen might earn $2 million in a good year, the industry’s kingpins, Henry Kravis and George Roberts, overseeing multibillion-dollar funds, each took home upward of $25 million in 1985.

“Steve from the early days didn’t like the [public investment fund] idea,” says Edward Pick, a senior banker at Morgan Stanley who was advising Blackstone about public market options at the time. Blackstone had good relations with the investors in its funds, Pick says, and Schwarzman didn’t see the need to turn to the public markets to raise investment capital. Still, KKR had raised $5 billion of permanent capital on which it would collect fees and carried interest. Round two in the race to the public markets had gone to KKR. The lesson Schwarzman drew: “Being the prime mover is critical.” CHAPTER 20 Too Good to Be True For Chinh Chu, the first sign that something was askew came in 2005 when Blackstone was weighing a bid for Tronox, which made titanium dioxide pigments used in paints.


pages: 229 words: 75,606

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win by Sachin Khajuria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, blockchain, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, disintermediation, diversification, East Village, financial engineering, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, index fund, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, mass affluent, moral hazard, passive investing, race to the bottom, random walk, risk/return, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

Do we agree with the difference between returns before fees (gross returns) and returns after private equity’s cut (net returns)? And do we understand the incentives at play? The interaction between management fees and carried interest? The interaction between a firm’s stock price and its funds under management, and the investment performance of those funds? Or the social impact of the deals? Is there really any systemic risk? These tough questions are not new for private equity. Neither are calls for tax rates on carried interest to match income tax rates—or at least for the spread between them to narrow. The same applies to calls for caps on the levels of high-yield debt that leveraged buyouts can rely on to enhance investment performance, calls for more transparency and greater accountability of private equity professionals when investments go wrong, calls for labor protections when private equity or indeed any form of private capital is involved in a business, calls for funding security for pension arrangements in private equity–backed companies, calls for regulators to restrict what private equity can and can’t buy in one sector of the economy or another because the assets are deemed by regulators to be too “sensitive,” and calls for regulators to supervise more closely the management of the firms.

The interests of investors in private equity funds are aligned with their private equity managers because both sides are keenly awaiting their returns. Retirement systems want to pay out pension checks for their teachers, firefighters, and healthcare workers. Private equity firms want to pay themselves carried interest, their cut of profits. It would be nonsensical to walk away from a struggling deal when there’s a chance of a turnaround. Investment professionals tend to stick with a deal through its lifetime, whether it is a winner or ends up being a loser. The reality of being chained to a frustrating investment for years is partly why discussions in the investment committee about putting money to work in the first place are so rigorous and frank.

They will recalibrate the sensitivity of returns to positive surprises and negative shocks. They will monitor the growth in the target’s profits and cash flow. They will keep an eye on the time frame and the options for exit. And everyone on the team will have a rough idea of how much money they stand to make from the deal, including carried interest. So, our aspiring masters of private equity know that it does not matter if the walls of the deal maze around them are moving; it only matters that they have (or quickly gain) the ability and stamina to craft a worthwhile exit. Let’s take a closer look at how this might play out in a deal, in this case an investment that experienced big problems


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

,” New York Times, August 12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/12/upshot/are-you-rich-where-does-your-net-worth-rank-wealth.html. dubious loopholes like carried interest: The Tax Policy Center defines the carried interest loophole as “Carried interest, income flowing to the general partner of a private investment fund, often is treated as capital gains for the purposes of taxation.” “Briefing Book,” Tax Policy Center, accessed January 2021, https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-carried-interest-and-how-it-taxed. Warren’s own proposal: Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Progressive Wealth Taxation,” BPEA Conference Draft, Brookings, Fall 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/progressive-wealth-taxation/.

Giving to causes rather than paying taxes shouldn’t be an option. Taxes, as opposed to gifts from the rich, allow elected officials to decide where this money should be spent, and not just on pet causes that can offer tax benefits for the rich, dubious loopholes like carried interest. (The next time you meet a philanthropist with, say, a private skating rink and a home with pergolas, ask them about “carried interest.”) In this way, the Patriotic Millionaires closely follow the blueprint of the University of California at Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, whose study of wealth taxes influenced Senator Elizabeth Warren’s own proposal.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

The founders who hold these shares include: Jeff Bezos (1), Bill Gates (2), Warren Buffett (3), Mark Zuckerberg (4), Larry Ellison (5), Larry Page (6), and Sergey Brin (9). Others among the top one hundred—for example, George Soros (60) and Carl Icahn (31)—owe their fortunes to carried interest. reported by one-percenters: Victor Fleischer, “How a Carried Interest Tax Could Raise $180 Billion,” New York Times, June 5, 2015, http://nytimes.com/2015/06/06/business/dealbook/how-a-carried-interest-tax-could-raise-180-billion.html. Fleischer reaches this result by inference from the legal structures typically employed by investment funds. In particular, investment funds are generally organized as partnerships, and the fund managers of investment funds are themselves also organized as partnerships.

These are not marginal or idiosyncratic categories of income (although the need to translate from tax categories to moral ones inevitably introduces judgment and imprecision into any accounting). Founder’s shares, carried interest, and executive stock compensation give nominally capital gains a substantial component of labor income, especially among the very rich. To begin with, roughly half of the twenty-five largest American fortunes, according to Forbes, arise from founder’s stock still held by the founders who built the firms. Moreover, the share of total capital gains income reported to the Treasury that is attributable to carried interest alone—to the labor of hedge fund managers—has grown by a factor of perhaps ten in the past two decades and now comprises a material share of all the capital gains reported by one-percenters.

A complete meritocratic accounting of earned advantage is more expansive than this and traces income through its shallow sources back to its deep roots—to reveal that some income nominally attributed to capital in fact originates in labor and therefore should be counted as earned through effort, skill, and industry. An entrepreneur who sells founder’s shares in her firm, an executive who realizes appreciation after being paid in stock, and a hedge fund manager who gets paid a “carried interest” share of profits on funds she invests (but does not own) all report capital gains income on their tax returns. But all these types of income ultimately reflect returns to the founder’s, the executive’s, or the manager’s labor and, the meritocrat insists, are on this account earned. A similar analysis applies to pensions and owner-occupied housing.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

As New York’s mayor, he has defended Wall Street with the hometown zeal of a Detroit politician supporting the carmakers or a prairie leader backing farmers. Nonetheless, here was Bloomberg on carried interest: “Since fair is fair, tax loopholes in the financial industry that are outdated should be closed, too, such as taxing carried interest at ordinary income rates. And I say this even though many of the people who would be affected are my constituents—so I assume I will get some phone calls later this afternoon.” GALT’S GULCH Carried interest is a very specific issue that touches a very specific group of people. The rise of Occupy Wall Street has brought a broader critique of the 1 percent to the fore, and in doing so has spurred some of the plutocrats to mount a more general self-defense.

Two other former Obama backers on Wall Street—both claim to have been on Rahm Emanuel’s speed dial list—recently told me that the president is “antibusiness”; one went so far as to worry that Obama is “a socialist.” In some cases, this sense of siege is almost literal. In the summer of 2010, for example, Blackstone’s Schwarzman caused an uproar when he said an Obama proposal to raise taxes on private equity firm compensation—by treating carried interest as ordinary income—was “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” However histrionic his metaphors, Schwarzman (who later apologized for the remark) is a Republican, so his antipathy for the current administration is no surprise. What is perhaps more surprising is the degree to which even former Obama supporters in the financial industry have turned against the president and his party.

“Even if you change the legislation the government won’t get a single penny more from me in taxes. I’ll put my money into my foundation and spend it on good causes. My money isn’t going to be wasted in your deficit sinkhole.” Indeed, within the private equity fraternity, which would be hardest hit by a change in the tax treatment of carried interest, this is very much the majority view. When I met him in his boathouse on Martha’s Vineyard, the cofounder of a private equity firm warned that raising the taxes on his industry would “kill” investment in this country and drive the money overseas. He also said it was morally unjust because private equity professionals like himself put their own money at risk and so did not deserve to have their profits taxed like regular income.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

As Chrystia Freeland writes in her book Plutocrats, the June 21, 2007, initial public offering of stock in Blackstone, his phenomenally successful private equity company, “marked the date when America’s plutocracy had its coming-out party.” By the end of the day, Schwarzman had made $677 million from selling shares, and he retained additional shares then valued at $7.8 billion. Schwarzman’s stunning payday made a huge and not entirely favorable impression in Washington. Soon after, Democrats began criticizing the carried-interest tax loophole and other accounting gimmicks that helped financiers amass so much wealth. In the wake of the 2008 market crash, as Obama and the Democrats began talking increasingly about Wall Street reforms, financiers like Schwarzman, Cohen, and Singer who flocked to the Koch seminars had much to lose.

He described McCarthy as a “serial offender” who had played “a pretty big part in lowering the bar on what is acceptable in American politics.” — Shortly before the Kochs held their second summit of the year, a June get-together at the St. Regis Resort in Aspen, they got a break that enormously increased their network’s financial clout when House Democrats passed a bill, backed by President Obama, to eliminate the so-called carried-interest loophole. The idea of eliminating the special tax break enjoyed by private equity and hedge fund managers struck fear in the finance industry. Obama had won the support of a surprisingly large share of New York’s finance titans in 2008, but his stance on the tax—which would never make it through the Senate—enraged many of its heaviest hitters.

Financiers resented being blamed for the collapse of the economy in 2008, they took extreme umbrage when Obama had chastised them as “fat cats,” and they claimed that his administration was run by college professors who knew nothing about business. But Schwarzman and a number of other financiers regarded this as a new level of affront and flocked to the June Koch summit with their checkbooks in hand, determined to prevent his reelection. Ironically, it was probably Schwarzman’s own excesses that had brought the carried-interest loophole to critics’ attention. In 2006, when he decided to transform Blackstone from a private partnership into a public company, he had been required to disclose his earnings for the first time. The numbers stunned both Wall Street and Washington. He made $398.3 million in 2006, which was nine times more than the CEO of Goldman Sachs.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The head of Washington State’s pension fund said in a 1989 interview, “If you had to name, on the fingers of one hand, the people who have had the greatest influence on U.S. capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century, those three guys are there.”18 KKR structured its relationship with the pension funds to ensure that it would receive ample compensation for taking their money. The partnership agreements governing the investments contained a veritable thicket of fees payable to KKR. The most important of these were the management and carried-interest fees. These might best be analogized to a salary and a bonus. The management fee, like a salary, was paid to KKR annually regardless of performance, while the carried-interest fee, like a bonus, was contingent on results, fluctuating based on how well its acquisitions went. A typical management fee in KKR’s deals would pay the firm, every year, between 1.5 and 2 percent of all the money it had raised.

To give a sense of the magnitude, the fund’s 1982 management fee was $4.5 million a year; the fund’s 1986 management fee was $27 million. These fees were stackable: KKR could earn management fees on each of its funds, so the firm was making tens of millions of dollars a year simply for taking investors’ money. The carried interest, on the other hand, gave KKR a percentage of any profits it made from buying and selling companies. A typical carried-interest fee gave KKR 20 percent of any profit above a certain threshold (or “hurdle”)—in effect, it had to beat the market in order to earn the fee. But other fees abounded as well: there were investment banking fees, transaction fees, and fees for the use of KKR associates whom KKR placed on the boards of its portfolio companies.

Enormous fees were paid to the advisors and participants in the deal as well: the investment banks working for KKR made at least $400 million in fees, which by one estimate amounted to roughly $48,000 an hour for the work each banker put in. KKR itself received a $75 million transaction fee, in addition to its usual management fee and future carried interest. To celebrate the acquisition, KKR threw a closing dinner in the Pierre Hotel’s grand ballroom with four hundred investment bankers, lawyers, and colleagues, where they dined on lobster, veal, and a three-foot-high cake decorated with Nabisco products, accompanied by Dom Perignon.35 The most damaging moment, among many, came when Johnson gave a long interview to TIME.


The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

These managers also enjoy remarkably favorable tax treatment, for reasons that no one can seem to explain with a straight face. For example, even though “carried interest”—mainly their 20 percent commission on portfolio gains—has the look and feel of ordinary income, it’s taxed at the 15 percent capital gains rate rather than the 35 percent top rate for ordinary income. That provision alone saved Mr. Paulson some $800 million dollars in taxes in 2007. Congress periodically considers proposals to tax carried interest as ordinary income. To no one’s surprise, financial industry lobbyists are always quick to insist that doing so would kill the geese that lay the golden eggs.

To no one’s surprise, financial industry lobbyists are always quick to insist that doing so would kill the geese that lay the golden eggs. The deals brokered by their clients often create enormous value, to be sure. Yet the proposed legislation would not block a single transaction worth doing. The same deal that currently augments a hedge fund manager’s after-tax income by $1 million would augment it by $765,000 if carried interest were taxed as ordinary income. Can anyone credibly claim that this would make him abandon the deal? Economic analysis suggests that higher taxes on hedge fund managers would actually boost production in other sectors of the economy by alleviating wasteful overcrowding in the market for aspiring portfolio managers.

See Civil Aeronautics Board California: pollution from cars in, 113; Proposition 13 in, 48–49; starve-the-beast strategy in, 47–50 229 230 INDEX campaign finance: government waste reduction through reform of, 51; perception of corruption in, 57 Canada, lack of corruption in, 56 cap-and-trade system, 181 capital gains tax rate, 163 capitalism: assumption of greed in, 33; labormanaged firms in, 32–34; task specialization in, 43 car(s): congestion fees for, 113–14, 182–83; context in evaluation of speed, 26; gasoline prices’ effect on design of, 181; need for corporations in industry, 90; pollution regulations for, 113; taxing by weight, 183–84 carbon dioxide tax, 179–82; cap-and-trade system as, 181; and climate change, 4, 179–82, 215; pace of implementation of, 4, 180–81 carried interest, 163 Carter, Jimmy, 112 cash-on-the-table metaphor, 31, 32, 35–36, 43 CEOs: before-tax versus after-tax incomes of, 154–55; competition in hiring of, 153–54; decision leverage of, 151–52; income growth of, 1, 61, 149–55; relationship between pay and ability of, 149–55; spending by, 60, 78 Cervantes, Miguel de, 215 Chicago Board of Trade, 177 children: helmet rules for, 187–89.


pages: 363 words: 28,546

Portfolio Design: A Modern Approach to Asset Allocation by R. Marston

asset allocation, Bob Litterman, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carried interest, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, German hyperinflation, global macro, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, inventory management, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, passive investing, purchasing power parity, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, survivorship bias, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Since CA has a large share of the institutional market, its index covers upward of 80 percent of all VC funds in existence. The index begins in 1981. Metrick (2007, Chapter 3) provides an analysis of the biases in each index. The returns on SHE are actually lower than those on CA despite the fact that the latter nets out management fees and carried interest. He uses a rough estimate of management fees and carried interest to adjust the SHE returns to a net basis. This results in a 7.5 percent gap between the CA and SHE indexes.6 Metrick argues that the CA index has survivorship bias due to the fact that many VC firms attract institutional money only after they have had successful VC funds.

The drawdown period typically takes several years, so the investors must keep the capital in liquid form in the meantime. Capital is typically committed for 10 years with limited extensions at the discretion of the general partners. Fees generally take two forms, a management fee levied on the committed capital and an incentive fee (termed carried interest or carry) based on performance. A typical fee structure involves a 2 percent management fee and a 20 percent incentive fee. The 2 percent management fee is levied on the committed capital from the beginning of the fund regardless of how much has been drawn down. So if there is a $100 million fund with capital committed for 10 years, then the total management fee will be $20 million over the 10-year period ($2 million per year).2 The incentive fee kicks in after the limited partners have recovered their committed capital.

Similarly, the 20 percent incentive fee follows different patterns. The incentive fee typically does not kick in until after the limited partners have recovered their capital. So if the limited partners have committed $100 million in capital, payouts from the investments must rise above $100 million before the general partners begin to receive carried interest. Thereafter, the GPs will be paid 20 percent of any returns. So if the fund eventually closes out with $200 million in exit proceeds, the GPs will earn $20 million (i.e., 20 percent of $200 million - $100 million). But some firms base their carry on the difference between the exit proceeds and the investment capital rather than committed capital.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

They benefit from unjustifiable tax advantages for carried interests. Carried interest is the portion of an investment fund’s returns eligible for a capital gains tax rate of 23.8 percent instead of the ordinary income tax rate of up to 37 percent. President Trump promised to close the loophole during his presidential campaign, but Congress caved in to the lobbying of private equity firms and did not close the loophole. Instead of an outright repeal, Congress required that a fund’s general partners hold the relevant investments for three years instead of one. Moreover, private fund managers discovered a way to keep the carried interest advantage in the tax law’s exemption for corporations.

Moreover, private fund managers discovered a way to keep the carried interest advantage in the tax law’s exemption for corporations. They set up corporate structures for executives entitled to receive carried interest. The second pitfall is that the US lacks a framework for data protection and data ownership. US banks want to keep control of their clients’ information to stave off competition. The same debate occurred in Europe, and, as you might expect, European banks lobbied hard against the idea of sharing their data. Unlike in the US, however, where legislators caved in immediately, the EU pressed ahead. Their fortitude was a consequence of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which essentially states that people own their data.

Valeo (1976), 182 bundling, 19 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 41, 42 business dynamism, decline in, 81 Cagé, Julia, 192, 193 campaign finance contributions, 176–181; impact on policy choices, 9; and future of Europe’s free markets, 148–149; and endogeneity bias, 157–160; skewness of, 166–170; soliciting, 176–177; laws regulating, 181–182; measuring impact of, 182–186; Citizens United v. FEC, 186–189; and lobbying, 189; benefits for politicians and business groups, 189–192; in Europe, 192–194, 202–203; and state politics in US, 195–197; difficulties in tracking, 197–202 capital, growth rate of, 65 capital share, 108 Cardiff Reports, 136 Caree, Martin, 147 carried interest, 221 Carril, Rodrigo, 288 cartel enforcement, 146–147 Case, Anne, 223, 229 cell phones. See mobile telecommunications Center for Responsible Politics, 184 Century Aluminum, 160 Chalmers, John M. R., 220 Chamberlin, Edward, 87 Chicago School of antitrust, 87 China shock, 58–60, 291 Churchill, Winston, 129–130, 207 Citigroup, 249 Citizens United v.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

These include paying themselves fees (on top of fees paid to consultants, investment bankers, lawyers, accountants and the like) for any transactions undertaken (the acquisition itself, acquisitions of other companies, the sale of divisions and so on), paying themselves monitoring fees as part of their role on the boards of these companies, and other service fees. All in all, this results in a fixed component for them of about two-thirds of the general partners' compensation.44 The final element of the PE firm's compensation is carried interest - the investment manager's share of the profits of an investment above the amount the manager committed to the partnership. For many years now, market practice has been that carried interest is 20 per cent of the profits generated over and above an agreed hurdle rate - i.e. a return on an investment below which a company will not pursue an investment opportunity or project. This element of the compensation is specifically meant to motivate general partners to perform, and PE capital gains are taxed at a favourable rate.

This element of the compensation is specifically meant to motivate general partners to perform, and PE capital gains are taxed at a favourable rate. But in practice, fees are so high that carried interest amounts to only about a third of general partners' compensation. PE firms also protect themselves by loading down the companies they acquire with debt, typically 60-80 per cent of the cost of an acquisition. Consider this: if an asset worth 100 is bought with 30 put in as equity by the investment manager and 70 from debt, the investment manager can make a 100 per cent return if the debt is paid off and the equity value goes up to 60.

In 2015, the five biggest care home chains controlled about a fifth of the total number of care home beds in the UK. These operators were attracted by stable cash flows, part of which came from local authorities, and opportunities for financial engineering: cheap debt; property which could be sold and leased back; tax breaks on debt interest payments and carried interest; and - ultimately - frail and vulnerable residents whom the state would have to look after if the business failed. The corporate structures of some care home owners became exceedingly complex and often hidden in tax havens, while corporation tax payments were low or nil. Given that local authorities still funded many care home placements and that the nurses employed in the homes had been state-trained, opaque corporate structures and minimal tax payments are hardly the way to provide an essential public service.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Harvard was grooming us to become “triathletes” who could hold leadership roles in three different arenas: business, government, and nonprofits. The program’s principal benefactor is David Rubenstein, a white male billionaire who made his fortune as the cofounder and CEO of Carlyle Group, the private equity giant. Rubenstein is known for his charitable giving but also for his fierce resistance to closing the carried interest loophole, which enables Rubenstein and other finance moguls to avoid $180 billion in taxes every decade. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump all campaigned against the loophole, but efforts to close it were defeated by the American Investment Council, a lobbying organization that was chaired at the time by one of Rubenstein’s lieutenants.1 The measure died three votes short of the majority it needed in 2010—and the loophole advantage hasn’t been seriously challenged since then.

As a result of practices like these, corporate power—and profits—are becoming increasingly concentrated. Winner-take-all economic systems sometimes produce profitable innovations that benefit society, but they also encourage freeloading. When the American Investment Council aligns otherwise-competing private equity firms to protect the carried interest loophole, that’s anticompetitive—and antidemocratic, since the public’s desire to close the loophole is suppressed. Extractive actions like these enabled Amazon and Tesla—the companies led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the world’s two richest men—to pay zero income taxes in 2018.9 When rich white guys deplete public infrastructure—such as the public universities that educate our workforces and the roads that get employees to our offices—without renewing it, we are engaging unsustainably, enriching ourselves at the expense of the public good.

And it means taking on corporate tax evasion, including leveraging America’s soft power to prevent other countries from serving as tax havens for rich white American men and their companies. On an individual level, it means overhauling a tax system that indulges the wealthy. To level the playing field, America must close loopholes like the carried interest loophole, abolish the $1 trillion-per-year tax deductions program, implement robust inheritance taxes to combat the literal reinvention of aristocracy, and tax capital gains as ordinary income because, in a capitalist system, few things are more ordinary than growing one’s capital. It must also reinstitute a highly progressive tax system that accounts for the fact that it is expensive to be poor and the fact that rich white men’s monopoly on power is unjust—and inefficient.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

The top earners made about $1 billion apiece in 2014 and again in 2015 even though their funds did not fare well. These incomes are lightly taxed due to the carried interest exemption, a tax loophole that taxes the income of hedge fund managers as capital gains instead of labor income, as shown dramatically by presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax returns. He paid taxes of less than 15 percent of his high income (which was smaller than the financial superstars’ incomes just described).24 The carried interest loophole is only one of the ways that members of the FTE sector reduce the taxes they pay. As congressional leaders were completing a massive tax and spending bill in late 2015, lobbyists descended from those that started in the early 1970s added fifty-four words that preserved a loophole for real estate and Wall Street investors that enabled them to put real estate in trusts to avoid taxes.

As congressional leaders were completing a massive tax and spending bill in late 2015, lobbyists descended from those that started in the early 1970s added fifty-four words that preserved a loophole for real estate and Wall Street investors that enabled them to put real estate in trusts to avoid taxes. The carried interest exemption and real estate trust provision are only two examples of tax loopholes initiated and maintained by lawyers and lobbyists for wealthy people.25 The rapid growth and high returns in finance raise questions about the role of finance in economic growth. The great changes in trade and production after the end of Bretton Woods clearly required active finance to accommodate, and there is no reason to deny the importance of finance in allowing economies to adapt to new conditions.


pages: 301 words: 88,082

The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business by Richard Brooks

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, financial deregulation, financial engineering, haute couture, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, mega-rich, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, shareholder value, short selling, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, two and twenty

‘His lobbying had been extremely effective.’‌27 This was the kind of time frame the private equity industry, which typically hangs around three to six years before cashing in, could deal with. Its leading lights made their serious income by putting in a small amount of their own money, typically between 1 and 3% of the investment in a fund, in return for perhaps 20% of the fund’s profit. Treated as a capital gain on an investment, this so-called ‘carried interest’ would be taxed at a quarter of the top income tax rate, or even less after other allowances. As the industry took off over the following years, expanding six-fold to attract £34bn worth of investments in 2006, the private equity fund managers scooped the jackpot.‌28 One of their number, alas, forgot to put his cross in the ‘no publicity’ box.

Completing the private equity circle of tax avoidance, Murphy’s most significant investment is almost certainly in Alliance Boots (on the board of which he sits), which we have already seen avoiding tax at both the corporate level by paying vast sums of interest offshore, and at the ownership level through Swiss and Gibraltar holding companies and trusts. Now its British, but non-domiciled, private equity manager sitting in London can escape tax when he cashes in his ‘carried interest’. KKR’s sale in 2012 of just half of its stake to an American chain for a £3bn gain suggests the non-dom tax break could prove highly valuable. It was soon reported that Murphy was one of seven out of KKR’s eight UK partners to claim the advantageous tax status, the others not British-born.‌34 The non-dom tax break, it was clear, was handing a competitive advantage in the battle for control over expanding swathes of British business to those with little attachment to the country.

Since over half the company’s income came in the form of interest paid tax-deductibly by British PFI companies controlled by HSBC – reducing their total tax bills to a piddling £0.9m in 2010/11 – the structure was highly tax effective.‌16 Nowhere was it better exemplified than at the Home Office and its PFI contract with Annes Gate Property plc. The millions that this company was paying on loans carrying interest at 14.75% headed to its owner and funder, HICL in Guernsey. The tax efficiency of PFI could sit gallingly alongside the real world consequences of the exorbitant initiative. When in 2011, for example, HICL bought a stake in the company running a 35-year PFI contract for the Pinderfields hospital in Wakefield, it acquired a loan that would pay over £1m a year ultimately to Guernsey.‌17 There of course it would not incur any of the tax that might in some small way have compensated for the £20m deficit back at the hospital trust, which was caused by the PFI payments in the first place and by 2012 had led to job cuts and nurses having to clean the wards.‌18 For many companies owning interests in PFI companies the offshore flit was irresistible.


pages: 602 words: 120,848

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

In 2007, the top twenty-five hedge fund managers earned nearly $900 million on average.9 Despite their awe-inspiring incomes, some of these financiers have been able to exploit features of tax law that predate the rise of hedge funds to pay only a 15 percent federal tax rate. Yes, 15 percent. “Carried interest” provisions allow fund managers to treat some of the spectacular fees investors pay them as capital gains—a favorable treatment supposedly reserved for those who are putting their own investments at risk. Warren Buffett used to say that it was outrageous that he and his secretary paid the same tax rate. Those benefitting from the “carried interest” loophole can do him one better. They pay a dramatically lower rate than their secretaries. As egregious as this loophole is, the defense game of Wall Street supporters like Schumer kept it firmly in place.

Take one of the more egregious examples: the ability of private equity and hedge fund managers to treat much of their extraordinary incomes as capital gains, subject only to a 15 percent tax rate. (In 2006, the top twenty-five hedge fund managers earned nearly $600 million on average, with the richest, James Simons, taking in $1.7 billion.)13 The “carried interest” provision that allows this sweetheart deal is a bug in the tax code that predates the rise of hedge funds. But while this loophole is almost universally viewed as indefensible (and may finally be closed a bit in 2010), it has been protected for years by the fierce lobbying of its deep-pocketed beneficiaries and the strong backing of Wall Street supporters like Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York.

., 17, 34, 41, 53, 105, 152, 157, 183, 186, 192, 193, 195, 200, 201, 210, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 221, 222, 223, 230, 233, 234, 236, 238–39, 245, 250–51, 253, 254–55, 258, 264, 265, 266, 271, 280, 293–94, 304 business: anti-labor agenda of, 55, 121–24, 127–32, 135, 219, 303 conservative support for, 122–23 Democrats supported by, 53, 86, 127, 129–32, 140, 174–88, 220–21, 223–52 economic reforms opposed by, 79–80, 86, 87–88, 130–32 financial resources of, 74, 121–22, 131, 170–72, 179–80, 209 “grassroots” campaigns by, 66, 89, 114, 119–27, 131, 144, 179–80, 274 inside vs. outside strategies of, 121 large, 119–27, 128, 129–32, 179–80, 205–6, 231, 275–78, 279 lobbyists for, 89, 117, 118, 124–26, 135–36, 144, 183–84, 198, 205–7, 218, 238–39, 275–77 organizations for, 88, 104–7, 116–36, 144, 160, 179–80, 205–6, 231, 275–78, 279, 291; see also specific organizations political influence of, 65–66, 74, 79, 84–85, 104–7, 110–12, 116–36, 150–51, 160, 169, 170–72, 179–80, 183–84, 197–98, 207, 230–31, 242–43, 271–75, 282, 292–93, 304 Powell memorandum on, 117–18, 119, 125 regulation of, 55–56, 116–36, 179–80, 187, 205–6, 219–21, 246–47, 273–77 Republicans supported by, 34, 49, 53, 65, 86, 121–26, 129–32, 140, 157, 170, 174–88, 189, 194–222, 230–31, 244–46, 267 small, 119–20, 129–30, 131, 205–6, 243 tax reform opposed by, 47, 49, 50, 64, 106–7, 124–25, 132–34, 177, 179–80, 187, 312n see also corporations business cycles, 17–18 Business-Industry Political Action Committee, 122 Business Roundtable, 120, 121, 125, 126–27, 129–30, 205–6, 231 Byrd, Robert, 130–31 cable networks, 106, 156–57, 158 California, 84, 176, 240, 247, 300 Campaigns and Elections, 203 campaign spending, 66, 118, 121–22, 150–51, 163–64, 166, 167, 169, 170–84, 197–98, 203, 207, 209–10, 219, 223–52, 258–59, 271–75, 276, 304 Campbell, Anne, 176 Canada, 29, 31, 38–39, 52, 58, 60, 68 Cao, Joseph, 337n capital gains, 14, 16, 18, 39, 46, 50–51, 99–100, 133–34, 151, 214, 228–30, 312n Carlson, Tucker, 147 Carlton Group, 133–34 “carried interest” provision, 51, 228–29 Carter, Jimmy, 98–100, 116, 126–27, 130, 131, 132–33, 134, 137, 141, 152, 172–73, 175, 184, 186, 202, 255 Carville, James, 5 Cato Institute, 209 Census Bureau, U.S., 13, 311n Center for American Progress, 266 Center for Responsive Politics, 207, 227 Chafee, Lincoln, 265 Chamber of Commerce, 119, 127, 128, 129–30, 205–6, 231, 275–78, 279 Cheney, Dick, 189–90, 217 chief executive officers (CEOs): autonomy of, 231, 292–93 conflicts of interest of, 55, 66 incomes of, 1, 16, 56, 62, 66–67, 154–55, 198 international comparison of, 62–65 organizations for, 119–21 pay packages for (executive compensation), 2, 57, 61–66, 70, 198, 219–21, 246–47, 279, 319n, 320n, 335n political influence of, 117–19 retirement benefits of, 64 Chiles, Lawton, 131, 181 Christian Coalition, 203 Christian Conservatives; see Religious Right Christian Right, 139, 146–49, 160, 201–4, 205, 234–35 Church, Frank, 175 Citigroup, 71, 226, 249–50, 254, 261 Citizens United case, 293 Civic Culture, The (Almond and Verba), 144 civic groups, 107–12, 139, 143–45, 147, 155, 156, 158 civil rights movement, 95, 138, 139, 190, 202, 235, 275 class divisions, 29, 75–77, 131–32, 148, 151–55 see also specific classes Class War?


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Worse, these funds have a much-criticized record of restructuring in ways that lead to large job losses and heavy debt, with the restructured firms often going into bankruptcy not long after the private equity firms sell them off. The reduced tax rate that private equity funds manage to pay, due to the so-called carried-interest loophole, was something Trump railed against in the campaign but never insisted on its repeal—if he mentioned it at all—as the tax bill wended its way through Congress on the way to his signature. Confronted with the broken promise, his advisers blamed Congress. See Louis Jacobson, “Despite Repeated Pledges to Get Rid of Carried Interest Tax Break, It Remains on the Books,” Politifact, Dec. 20, 2017. 7.Over the ten-year period 2018–2028, the tax cut alone (with interest) is expected to add $1.9 trillion to the deficit.

Key reforms include full taxation of dividends, capital gains, interest on local bonds, and the elimination of a host of loopholes, including the provision providing for a step-up in basis for capital gains taxation when assets are inherited, so that taxes are only paid on the difference between the price at which the asset is sold and the price at the time of inheritance—the entire capital gain during the previous generation goes untaxed. 52.Among these is the “carried interest” provision (in the Internal Revenue Code of 1986) noted earlier: those in private equity (buying firms, restructuring them, and then selling them) typically pay the low capital gains tax rate on their income, rather than the far higher rate that those working in other sectors have to pay. 53.Though the evidence, in each of these cases, is that the responses are normally small, or as economists say, the tax elasticities are low. 54.See Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth (San Francisco: W.

Gore, 165–66 Cambridge Analytica, 127–28, 132 campaign spending, 171–73; See also Citizens United Canada, 17 capital-income ratio, 54 capitalism American-style, See American-style capitalism end of communism as alleged triumph of, 3 capitalized value of rents, 282n17 capital stock, 53 capture, 149, 223, 333n32 carbon tax, 194, 206–7 carried-interest loophole, 258n6 Carter, Jimmy, and administration, 78 Case, Anne, 41–42 CEA (Council of Economic Advisers), xii Centers for Disease Control, 41 central banks, 142 CEO salaries, 39, 198, 298n89 Chao, Elaine L., 335n6 Charter Communications, 147 charter schools, 342n43 checks and balances, 163–67, 232–34 Chicago School, 68–69 childcare, 197 China economic ideology, 28–29 GDP, 272n12 and globalization, 81, 94–98 and global risk-free return on capital, 53 growth rate, 37 lack of privacy protections, 135 and risk-free return on capital, 53 trade wars, 93–94 and US unemployment, 83 churn, 314n21 cigarette companies, 18, 20 Circle, The (Eggers), 128 Citigroup, 107 Citizens United v.


Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The general partners get a management fee, usually 1% or 2% of capital committed,24 plus a carried interest in 20% of any profits earned by the partnership. In other words, the limited partners get paid off first, but then get only 80% of any further returns. The general partners therefore have a call option on 20% of the partnership’s total future payoff, with an exercise price set by the limited partners’ investment.25 You can see some of the advantages of private-equity partnerships: • Carried interest gives the general partners plenty of upside. They are strongly motivated to earn back the limited partners’ investment and deliver a profit. • Carried interest, because it is a call option, gives the general partners incentives to take risks.

BEYOND THE PAGE ● ● ● ● ● U.S. venture capital investment brealey.mhhe.com/c15 Most venture capital funds are organized as limited private partnerships with a fixed life of about 10 years. Pension funds and other investors are the limited partners. The management company, which is the general partner, is responsible for making and overseeing the investments, and in return receives a fixed fee and a share of the profits, called the carried interest.5 You will find that these venture capital partnerships are often lumped together with similar partnerships that provide funds for companies in distress or that buy out whole companies or divisions of public companies and then take them private. The general term for these activities is private equity investing.

Total value of company after issue. d. Total number of shares after issue. e. Stock price after the issue. f. Price of the right to buy one new share. INTERMEDIATE 8. Definitions Here is a further vocabulary quiz. Briefly explain each of the following: a. Zero-stage vs. first- or second-stage financing. b. Carried interest. c. Rights issue. d. Road show. e. Best-efforts offer. f. Qualified institutional buyer. g. Blue-sky laws. h. Greenshoe option. 9. Venture capital a. “A signal is credible only if it is costly.” Explain why management’s willingness to invest in Marvin’s equity was a credible signal. Was its willingness to accept only part of the venture capital that would eventually be needed also a credible signal?


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The general partners (those who run the fund) will earn their cut in two ways. First, they will take an annual management fee, which may be as much as 2 per cent of the funds invested. This fee is designed to cover the managers’ running costs. Secondly, they will take a performance fee, known as ‘carried interest’, when the assets are sold, often 20 per cent of all profits after an agreed hurdle return has been reached. It is this carried interest that has made private equity fund managers rich. And it has also aroused plenty of controversy, given that it is taxed in many jurisdictions as a capital gain, rather than as income. Since capital gains usually bear a lower tax rate, this results in the anomalous situation where private equity managers are taxed at a lower rate than their office cleaners, as one financier memorably described it.

Index AAA Status of US Adams, Douglas Adams, John Addison, Lord Adenauer, Konrad adjustable rate mortgages adulterating coins affluent society Afghanistan ageing populations agrarian revolution Ahamed, Liaquat AIG air miles Alaska Amazon.com Angell, Norman Anglo Irish Bank annuities Argentina Aristophanes Arkansas Asian crisis of 1997 – 8 asset prices assignats Athens Austen, Jane austerity Austria Austrian school Austro-Hungarian empire Aztecs B&Q baby boomers Babylon Bagehot, Walter bailouts balanced budget Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem Balfour, Arthur Bancor Bank for International Settlements bank notes Bank of England bank reserves bank runs bankruptcy codes Banque Generale Barclays Capital Baring, Peter Baring Brothers Barnes & Noble barter Basle Accords Bastiat, Frederic BCA Research BCCI bear markets Bear Stearns Beaverbrook, Lord Belgium Belloc, Hillaire Benn, Tony Benn, William Wedgwood Bernanke, Ben Bernholz, Peter bezant Big Bang Big Mac index bills of exchange bimetallism biofuels Bismarck, Otto von Black Death Black Monday black swan Blackstone Blair, Tony Blum, Léon BMW Bodencreditanstalt Bohemia Bolsheviks Bonnet, Georges Bootle, Roger Brady, Nicholas Brady bonds Brazil Bretton Woods system Brodsky, Paul Brooke, Rupert Brown, Gordon Bruning, Heinrich Brutus Bryan, William Jennings bubbles budget deficits budget surplus building societies Buiter, Willem Bundesbank Burns, Arthur Bush, George W. Business Week Butler, Eamonn Calder, Lendol California Callaghan, Jim Calvin, John Canada Canadian Tar Sands capital controls capital economics capital flows capital ratios carried interest carry trade Carville, James Cassano, Joseph Cato Institute Cayne, Jimmy CDU Party ‘Celtic tiger’ central bank reserves Cesarino, Filippo ‘Chapter’ Charlemagne Charles I, King of England cheques/checks chief executive pay Chile China Churchill, Winston civil war (English) civil war (US) Citigroup clearing union Clientilism Clinton, Bill CNBC collateralized debt obligations commerical banks commercial property commodity prices Compagnie D’Occident comparative advantage conduits confederacy Congdon, Tim Congress, US Connally, John Conservative Party Consols Constantine, Emperor of Rome consumer price inflation continental bonds convergence trade convertibility of gold suspended Coolidge, Calvin copper Cottarelli, Carlo Council of Nicea Cowen, Brian cowrie shells Credit Anstalt credit cards credit crisis of 2007 – 8 credit crunch credit default swaps ‘cross of gold’ speech Cunliffe committee Currency Board currency wars Dante Alighieri David Copperfield Davies, Glyn debasing the currency debit cards debt ceiling debt clock debt deflation spiral debt trap debtors vs creditors, battle defaults defined contribution pension deflation Defoe, Daniel Delors, Jacques Democratic convention of 1896 Democratic Party Democratic Republic of Congo demographics denarii Denmark deposit insurance depreciation of currencies derivatives Deutsche Bank Deutschmark devaluation Dickens, Charles Dionysius of Syracuse Dodd – Frank bill dollar, US Dow Jones Industrial Average drachma Duke, Elizabeth Dumas, Charles Duncan, Richard Durst, Seymour Dutch Republic East Germany East Indies companies Economist Edward III, King of England Edwards, Albert efficient-market theory Egypt Eichengreen, Barry electronic money embedded energy energy efficiency estate agents Estates General Ethelred the Unready euro eurobonds eurodollar market European Central Bank European Commission European Financial Stability Facility European Monetary System European Union eurozone Exchange Rate Mechanism, European exorbitant privilege farmers Federal Reserve Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Federalist party fertility rate ‘fiat money’ Fiji final salary pension Financial Services Authority Financial Times Finland First Bank of the United States First World War fiscal policy fiscal union Fisher, Irving fixed exchange rates floating currencies florin Florio, Jim Ford, Gerald Ford, Henry Ford Motor Company Foreign & Colonial Trust foreign direct investment foreign exchange reserves Forni, Lorenzo Forsyte Saga France Francis I, King of France Franco-Prussian War Franklin, Benjamin French Revolution Friedman, Milton Fuld, Dick futures markets Galbraith, John Kenneth Galsworthy, John GATT Gaulle, Charles de Geithner, Tim General Electric General Motors general strike of 1926 Genghis Khan Genoa conference George V, King of England Germany gilts Gladstone, William Glass – Steagall Act Gleneagles summit Glorious Revolution GMO Gokhale, Jagadeesh gold gold exchange standard gold pool gold standard Goldman Sachs goldsmiths Goodhart, Charles Goodhart’s Law Goschen, George Gottschalk, Jan government bonds government debt Graham, Frank Granada Grantham, Jeremy Great Compression Great Depression Great Moderation Great Society Greece Greenspan, Alan Gresham, Sir Thomas Gresham’s Law Gross, Bill G7 nations G20 meeting Guinea Habsburgs Haiti Haldane, Andrew Hamilton, Alexander Hammurabi of Babylon Havenstein, Rudolf von Hayek, Friedrich Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative hedge funds Henderson, Arthur Henry VIII, King of England Hien Tsung, Chinese emperor Hitler, Adolf Hoar, George Frisbie Hohenzollern monarchy Holy Roman Empire Homer, Sydney Hoover, Herbert House of Representatives houses Hume, David Hussein, Saddam Hutchinson, Thomas Hyde, H.


pages: 233 words: 71,775

The Joy of Tax by Richard Murphy

banking crisis, banks create money, carbon tax, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, full employment, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, green new deal, high net worth, Jeremy Corbyn, land value tax, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, offshore financial centre, price elasticity of demand, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, savings glut, seigniorage, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing

In the meantime, whoever previously owned the Treasury bond or gilt now has freshly created money instead, made out of thin air, which they can now go and spend. Debt has been cancelled and money has been created and whilst, of course, all money is ultimately a government debt (which is why notes have the phrase ‘I promise to pay the bearer’ on them), it’s also true they are never repaid and don’t carry interest. The government debt that once carried interest can now be interest free. And the deficit that gave rise to the Treasury bond or gilt has now been replaced by newly created money, which just goes to prove that this is exactly what a government does when it runs a deficit – it creates government-made money. If you don’t believe this you wouldn’t be alone.


pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s amendment to do just that was voted down 60 to 35.51 So much for “financial stability.” Though I suppose it depends on whose financial stability you care about—the banks’ or the taxpayers’. Or how about payday lending—the largely unregulated advances on a paycheck that can carry interest rates in the triple digits? In Missouri, for example, rates can top 600 percent.52 Yes, you read that right. Not exactly a recipe for “financial stability.” North Carolina’s Kay Hagan offered an amendment that would have clamped down on the $40 billion industry. It was killed without a vote.53 Then there is the Merkley-Levin amendment that would have prohibited banks from making risky proprietary trades—a version of the Volcker Rule.54 It also never even made it to a vote.

Treasury.45 And they wouldn’t ban companies using offshore tax havens from receiving government contracts, which is stunning given the hard times we are in and the populist groundswell against the way average Americans are getting the short end of the stick. But the bills would end one of the more egregious examples of the tax policy double standard, finally forcing hedge-fund managers to pay taxes at the same rate as everybody else. As the law stands now, their income is considered “carried interest,” and is accordingly taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent.46 According to former labor secretary Robert Reich, in 2009 “the 25 most successful hedge-fund managers earned a billion dollars each.”47 The top earner clocked in at $4 billion. Closing this outrageous loophole would bring in close to $20 billion in revenue—money desperately needed at a time when teachers and nurses and firemen are being laid off all around the country.48 But the two sets of rules—and the clout of corporate lobbyists—leave even commonsense, who-could-argue-with-that proposals in doubt, and leave the middle class shouldering an unfair share of a very taxing burden.


pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

.,” Munich Personal RePEc Archive, MPRA Paper No. 29672 (Jan 2011). blamed income inequality Kim M. Bloomquist (2003), “Tax Evasion, Income Inequality and Opportunity Costs of Compliance,” Paper presented at the 96th Annual Conference of the National Tax Association. carried-interest tax Nicholas Kristof (6 Jul 2011), “Taxes and Billionaires,” New York Times. Laura Saunders (6 Aug 2011), “'Carried Interest' in the Cross Hairs,” Wall Street Journal. investment tax credit Don MacKenzie, Louise Bedsworth, and David Friedman (2005), “Fuel Economy Fraud: Closing the Loopholes That Increase U.S. Oil Dependence,” Union of Concerned Scientists.

There are a lot of creative companies figuring out ways to follow the letter of the tax law while completely ignoring the spirit. This is how companies can make billions in profits yet pay little in taxes. And make no mistake, industries, professions, and groups of wealthy people deliberately manipulate the legislative system by lobbying Congress to get special tax exemptions to benefit themselves. One example is the carried-interest tax loophole: the taxation of private equity fund and hedge fund manager compensation at the 15% long-term capital gains tax rate rather than as regular income. Another is the investment tax credit, intended to help building contractors, that people used to subsidize expensive SUVs. There's also tax flight—companies moving profits out of the country to reduce taxes.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Left unmentioned in that profile, or in the many other glowing features on his philanthropy, was that Rubenstein had played a role in the depletion of those government resources. He and other private-equity investment managers had for years benefited from a loophole that allowed their compensation for managing other people’s investments to be taxed at the capital gains rate for investment income, rather than at the much higher rate for ordinary income. The “carried interest” loophole saved the wealthiest private-equity executives close to $100 million annually, per person; by conservative estimates, it cost the Treasury $2 billion per year; one expert argued the sum was in fact many times that large. Rubenstein had not only profited enormously from the loophole, but at crucial moments over the years he had helped stave off congressional efforts to close it by working his ties on Capitol Hill.

“All of my best decisions have been made with heart and intuition and guts, not analysis,” he said. There was no mention of the fight over the homelessness tax in Seattle three months earlier. There was no mention of the debate over the tax cuts signed into law by President Trump, which had slashed rates for corporations and the wealthiest while leaving the carried-interest loophole untouched. In fact, the word tax would not be uttered once by Bezos or Rubenstein in any context over the course of the seventy-minute interview. Instead, Rubenstein turned toward the topic so many in the ballroom were most eager to hear about. “When you use your intuition to make decisions, where is the intuition leading you now on your second headquarters?”

Louis move for Dunbar, Paul Laurence Durkan, Jenny Easter Sunday e-commerce: Amazon control of; Amazon expanding sales in; the Bon-Ton trying; growth of; repercussions of expanding Economic Club economic concentration economic location Edwards, Gary Edwards, Jay Elliott Bay Book Company El Paso, Texas: Amazon Day Expo in; coronavirus pandemic in; grocery near border of; Pencil Cup Office Products in; Sturgis & Co. in; UTEP; see also Gandara, Teresa; Grodin, Sandy El Paso Independent School District El Paso Office Products energy consumption entitlement Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip Etna, Ohio Faber-Castell Facebook: antitrust law investigations involving; The Bon-Ton Family on; coronavirus pandemic benefiting; journalism takeover by; total capital spending soar for failure FBA, see Fulfillment by Amazon FDR, see Roosevelt, Franklin D. federal income tax: carried interest loophole regarding; charitable deduction for avoiding; creation of; philanthropy correlation to financial crash (2008) financial institutions Fiore, Mark Florida Floyd, George food stamps forklifts: Bodani, W. K., work responsibilities driving; deaths from accidents involving; OSHA hazard warning on standup; PIT; Rhoads work responsibilities driving Foroohar, Rana Fowler, Henry France warehouse Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) fulfillment centers: definition of; tax subsidies for opening Galloway, Scott Gandara, Carlos, Jr.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The tax cuts passed by Bush and extended by Obama represent a total of $81.5 billion transferred from the state into the hands of the richest 1 percent. Meanwhile, hedge fund managers and their surrogates have deployed millions of dollars to lobbyists to maintain the so-called carried interest loophole, a provision of tax law that allows fund managers to classify much of their income drawn from investing gains as “carried interest” so that it is taxed at the low capital gains rate of 15 percent, rather than the marginal income rate, which would in most cases be more than twice that. It was this wrinkle in the law that helped Mitt Romney, a man worth an estimated quarter of a billion dollars, pay an effective tax rate of just under 14 percent in 2010.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Those who can often be found at the absolute top of the earnings scale—people who manage hedge funds and private equity and venture funds—enjoy a loophole that allows the money they make by investing money for others (their “carried interest”) to be taxed as capital gains, not earned income, even though they get the money for their work, not as a return on money they have invested. Despite that carried interest loophole (which came from a little noticed but ardently lobbied IRS decision in 1993), Americans who have focused on such issues have been conditioned to believe that capital gains deserve favorable treatment.

The imbalance could be measured not just in bodies but also in the unending flow of alternative-language proposals and “white papers” that the lobbyists churned out. One was a glossy “study” full of color graphs and charts, written by consultants on behalf of a group representing private equity funds, defending the “carried interest” tax loophole. The seemingly authoritative graphs and heavily footnoted text purported to explain how taxing those who run these funds at the same rates that everyone else pays on their earned income would be disastrous for the economy, killing millions of jobs and driving away trillions of investment dollars.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

To this day, the venture capital industry suffers in the institutional investor marketplace, where they believe it is not an asset class, but an anomaly, with just a handful of firms that through some alchemy are able to consistently produce strong results. It took years for the venture industry to recover. And when it did, John, Steve and I made some significant money through our profits interest (called “carried interest”) from our success with DFJ ePlanet. With our newfound wealth, we each discussed what we would like to do going forward. We decided to peel off into what we would call the three rockets. John Fisher decided to focus on late-stage investing and created and helped build DFJ Growth with Barry Schuler, former CEO of AOL, and Mark Bailey, who previously worked at KPCB, Symantec and WebMD.

You need to be on top of your business model, you need to be open to new ways of thinking, and you need to be enthusiastic and optimistic about your business. A note about venture capitalists. They make their money by generating profits for their investors. Their main source of income is a “carried interest” that only gets large if they take big risks on companies they invest in. They are willing to lose a few of their investments as long as their winners become extraordinarily large. They do that by pushing potentially great companies through their investment committees and finding a few companies that will provide outsized returns for their investors. venture capitalists know only too well that many, in fact most, startups don’t succeed, so venture capitalists have to count on the few that do succeed to become very large so they can make many times their money from investments in the successful companies.


pages: 291 words: 92,688

Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam

carried interest, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, liberation theology, Mason jar, mass incarceration, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

But I was drawn to his posture of authority; he was conventionally handsome, and I could imagine him mistreating his family in all the ways Amy had mentioned, growling at breakfast, forgetting birthdays, spending Christmas alone in a hotel in Lisbon, falling asleep at dinner. I couldn’t fully assess the debate on carried interest, or whether the companies he’d succeeded in turning around justified the ones he’d accidentally leveraged into bankruptcy, or, more generally, whether bankers should have their intestines wrapped around their throats for wrecking the earth’s economy, but I’d heard from Amy how hard he worked to unlock potential value in undercapitalized industries.

She had all the wrong instincts, took her cues from all the wrong people, from a clergy of predators and an old Nazi pope in a crown. Nothing weird about that, nothing wrong with liberation theology in a banking context in a late-capitalist nightmare in the midst of an environmental meltdown. Arcane legislation written in secret by industry cronies on obscure financial practices and windfalls for carried interest had made her rich. She’d been formed by her parents’ immigrant struggle, a smoldering blue-collar rage, and the last two bull markets. Socially progressive, fiscally conservative, except the second part canceled out the first. She backed the NRDC, PETA, NOW, and Planned Parenthood, but also believed in trickle-down and thought lazy people who sat in drum circles on private property complaining about corporate greed weren’t helping.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

However, thirty years is a long enough period to even out the consequences of risk, and over the longer term, rich wealth-holders did do better than the middle class. Asset classes held by the rich are also more valuable because they tend to be taxed less than asset classes held by the middle class. Thus capital gains and, in the United States, carried interest (income received by investment fund managers) are, in most cases, taxed at lower rates than interest from savings accounts.26 The rich also enjoy the advantages of size: entry costs (the minimum amount required for investment) to high-yield assets are high and discourage small investors; rich investors can also avail themselves of much better advice about where to invest and, per unit of dollar invested, pay lower fees.

The existence in rich countries of an important part of the population without assets is not unique to the United States. Grabka and Westermeier (2014) estimate that 28 percent of German adults have zero or negative net wealth, while the bottom half of the Swedish population has negative wealth (Lundberg and Walderström 2016, table 1). 26. Carried interest is taxed as a capital gain, at a rate of about 20 percent. Interest from savings accounts is taxed as ordinary income, where the top rate is around 40 percent. 27. Bas van Bavel (pers. comm.) gave me the example of BNP Paribas Fortis wealth management fund, which distinguishes between its retail, priority, private banking, and wealth management clients.


pages: 124 words: 39,011

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

That’s because so much of the income of the super-rich is classified as capital gains, which, at 15 percent, creates a loophole large enough for the super-rich to drive their Ferraris through. Well-heeled tax lawyers and accountants are kept busy year-round figuring out how to make the earnings of their clients look like capital gains. Congress still hasn’t closed the “carried interest” loophole that allows mutual-fund and private-equity managers to treat their incomes as capital gains. Great wealth creates opportunities for ever greater tax loopholes. In 2010, eighteen thousand American households earning more than half a million dollars paid no income taxes at all. The estate tax (which affects only the top 2 percent) has also been slashed.


pages: 134 words: 41,085

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

The lobbyists’ most seductive gift is not an all-expenses-paid trip but a supply of briefing documents that help an overworked politician to stay on top of the news and cope with the tsunami of words that washes over their desks. Much of the lobbyists’ energy goes into protecting arcane pieces of legislation that matter enormously to one group. The “carried interest” tax break that gives private equity an advantage over other ways of running a company is always due to be scrapped in each tax reform package, but mysteriously never is. Back in 1920, the US Congress, ruminating on the First World War, passed the Merchant Marine Act, decreeing that all goods being transported from one American port to another must be carried by US ships owned by US citizens and operated by US crews.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

It is estimated that these kinds of special tax provisions amount to some $123 billion a year, and that the price tag for offshore tax loopholes is not far behind. Eliminating these provisions alone would go a long way toward meeting deficit-reduction targets called for by fiscal conservatives who worry about the size of the public debt. Yet another source of unfairness is the tax treatment on so-called carried interest. Some Wall Street financiers are able to pay taxes at lower capital-gains tax rates on income that comes from managing assets for private equity funds or hedge funds. But why should managing financial assets be treated any differently from managing people, or making discoveries? Of course, those in finance say they are essential.

Of course, those in finance say they are essential. But so are doctors, lawyers, teachers, and everyone else who contributes to making our complex society work. They say they are necessary for job creation. But in fact, many of the private equity firms that have excelled in exploiting the carried interest loophole are actually job destroyers; they excel in restructuring firms to “save” on labor costs, often by moving jobs abroad. Economists often eschew the word “fair”—fairness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But the unfairness of the American tax system has gotten so great that it’s dishonest to apply any other label to it.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

According to Oxfam, for example, the fifty largest American companies have, by perfectly legal means, shifted over $1 trillion to offshore tax havens, costing the US government about $111 billion in lost tax revenue.21 Rich individuals are taxed in a similarly lax manner. One reason why some billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than their secretaries, as Warren Buffett has famously lamented, is that politicians continue to give massive handouts to them: the carried-interest deduction, for example, allows hedge fund managers to halve the tax they would ordinarily pay on the bulk of their earnings.22 But another big reason is that rich individuals have been just as adept at evading the taxman as corporations: as the leak of the Panama Papers demonstrated, vast fortunes are channeled into offshore tax havens every year; though much of this activity is illegal, it rarely results in prosecutions.23 To ensure that both individuals and corporations pay their fair share of taxes, we should therefore be willing to consider what a tax system might look like if it was invented from scratch.

Dyreng and Bradley P. Lindsey, “Using Financial Accounting Data to Examine the Effect of Foreign Operations Located in Tax Havens and Other Countries on U.S. Multinational Firms’ Tax Rates,” Journal of Accounting Research 47 (2009): 1283–1316. 22. Michael S. Knoll, “The Taxation of Private Equity Carried Interests: Estimating the Revenue Effects of Taxing Profit Interests as Ordinary Income,” William and Mary Law Review 50, no. 1 (2008): 115–161. On the “Buffett Rule,” see Warren E. Buffett, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” New York Times, August 14, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html; and Chris Isadore, “Buffett Says He’s Still Paying Lower Tax Rate than His Secretary,” CNN Money, March 4, 2013, http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secretary-taxes/index.html. 23.


pages: 162 words: 50,108

The Little Book of Hedge Funds by Anthony Scaramucci

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business process, carried interest, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, follow your passion, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, managed futures, margin call, mass immigration, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

And through it all, hedge funds will remain the alternative investment that not only makes money, but perhaps more important, rationalizes the irrational market by flattening out the kinks in the global market. In the Words of a Hedge Fund Legend . . . Barton M. Biggs, Managing Partner, Traxis Partners 1. How would you define a hedge fund? A hedge fund is a pool of money run by a small number of cocky, arrogant souls who charge outrageous fees including a carried interest and expect to shoot the lights out. 2. How or why did you get started in the industry? I began running a fund for Alfred Jones and the first hedge fund A.W. Jones & Co. back in 1964 when I was an analyst at E.F. Hutton & Co. 3. What hedge fund strategies do you use? I am a macro hedge fund manager and am inclined to concentrate on financial assets which I consider to be my circle of competence, in other words I don’t dabble in commodities and currencies. 4.


pages: 190 words: 53,409

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

But, to hear him tell it, he’s beset by a meddlesome, tax-happy government and a whiny, envious populace. He recently grumbled that the U.S. middle class has taken to “blaming wealthy people” for its problems. Previously, he has said that it might be good to raise income taxes on the poor so they had “skin in the game,” and that proposals to repeal the carried-interest tax loophole—from which he personally benefits—were akin to the German invasion of Poland.19 Surowiecki went on to note that other wealthy executives have been voicing similar complaints. The venture capitalist Tom Perkins and the Home Depot cofounder Kenneth Langone, for example, each recently likened populist criticism of the wealthy to the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Let’s say a private equity firm buys a successful pharma company and generates huge internal profits, whether from creating an even better pharma company or from debt-fuelled looting. The GPs’ first trick is the famous 2 and 20 formula: they take 2 per cent of the value of invested funds annually as management fees, plus the so-called carried interest, which is typically 20 per cent of any internal profits generated, though often only after the fund has attained a ‘hurdle rate’ of profit. That formula may sound reasonable, but in the real world the mathematics rips surprisingly large chunks of the profits away from the outside investors and channels them into the moguls’ pockets, especially when the portfolio company fares badly.22 Below that exists another world of chicanery of hidden fees, usually at the level of the portfolio companies the PE firms buy.

Normal companies typically use something like three times as much debt as equity (the owners’ own money), while with private equity it’s roughly the other way around. See Appelbaum and Batt, Private Equity at Work, p.77, which also has the 40 per cent figure for enterprise value. On the tax changes in the UK, see ‘Private equity execs face bigger tax on “carried interest”’, Financial Times, 31 March 2016. Research shows that private equity firms are significantly more aggressive in using tax havens and other schemes to escape paying tax, and this is particularly true of the larger firms, which can afford the armies of lawyers and accountants necessary to design the complex schemes that really shake the taxman off.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

But whatever your remedies to the crisis of liberal democracy, nothing much is likely to happen unless the West’s elites understand the enormity of what they face. If only out of self-preservation, the rich need to emerge from their postmodern Versailles. At the moment they seem busier shoring up its fortifications. In 2009, the Obama administration proposed a modest taxation of carried interest that would have treated a small slice of capital earnings as income. This would have taken a tiny bite out of the incomes of the largest hedge-fund and private-equity tycoons. As Warren Buffet said, ‘It is not fair that I am paying lower taxes than my secretary.’ Wall Street rose up in opposition.


pages: 261 words: 70,584

Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy by Gregory Brandon Salsbury

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, buy and hold, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, hindsight bias, housing crisis, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mass affluent, Maui Hawaii, mental accounting, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, National Debt Clock, negative equity, new economy, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, Yogi Berra

The top 20% of households paid 81.2% of all taxes during the presidency of Bill Clinton, and in 2006, these households paid a record 86.3% of all taxes.63 And that trend is only going to continue since, according to President Obama’s 2010 federal budget, increased taxes on “the rich” will equal 0.3% of GDP—echoes of Herbert Hoover’s tax hikes that put the “Great” into “Great Depression.”64 Or of California today. What about the wealthy? Presently, the goal in Washington is to take people who earn $250,000 a year or more in income, approximately 2.6 million Americans, and collect $636.7 billion in taxes from them.65 Additionally, “carried interest” from a hedge fund, a venture capital firm, a private equity firm, or some other partnership presently taxed at 15% may soon be taxed at 39.6%.66 In 1984, a tax on retirees’ Social Security benefits was introduced, which made up to 50% of a beneficiary’s Social Security check taxable if the person’s other income—retirement plan payout, investment income, and so on—exceeded $25,000 annually ($32,000 for couples).


pages: 239 words: 69,496

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

The massive growth of the alternative assets industry over the last three decades is an underappreciated development in our capital markets. That development is predicated on the idea that some investors—such as hedge funds, private equity funds, and venture capital funds—are truly skilled and can generate alpha. That alpha generation serves as the foundation for their fees. Their fee structures—so-called carried interest—are a function of their performance, so, the logic goes, they only get paid when they do well. Of course, the reality is not quite so benign. These investors have been shown to not outperform reasonable benchmarks on average, and the evidence of skill for most of them is fleeting—except for, perhaps, funds in the top decile of those funds.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

It was something like a firmament, endless stars and within each star an endless firmament and within each one further endless … It bordered on mystic perception. It gave him the feeling of being part of an infinite existence. R. K. Narayan, The Financial Expert, 1952 In the beginning was the loan and the loan carried interest. Well, this may have been the case. We don’t know for sure, but it’s now widely believed that the earliest transactions were for credit rather than barter. We do know that the Mesopotamians charged interest on loans before they discovered how to put wheels on carts. Interest is much older than coined money, which only originated in the eighth century BC.

Ben Protess and Michael Corkery, ‘Just How Much Do the Top Private Equity Earners Make?’, New York Times, 10 December 2016. Median pay for the buyout barons in 2015 was $138 million, compared with $23 million for top bankers according to the New York Times. Private equity executives were also helped by the fact that they paid a lower tax rate on fees charged as ‘carried interest’. This subsidy was estimated to have been worth $180 billion over the previous decade. 46. Nouriel Roubini, ‘Public Losses for Private Gain’, Guardian, 18 September 2008. 47. See Piketty, Capital, p. 135, and Galbraith, Inequality and Instability, p. 4. 48. Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done?


pages: 252 words: 72,473

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

The human suffering, which had been hidden from view behind numbers, spreadsheets, and risk scores, became palpable. The chatter at Shaw was nervous. After the fall of Lehman Brothers in September of 2008, people discussed the political fallout. Barack Obama looked likely to win the election in November. Would he hammer the industry with new regulations? Raise taxes on carried interest? These people weren’t losing their houses or maxing out their credit cards just to stay afloat. But they found plenty to worry about, just the same. The only choice was to wait it out, let the lobbyists do their work, and see if we’d be allowed to continue as usual. By 2009, it was clear that the lessons of the market collapse had brought no new direction to the world of finance and had instilled no new values.


pages: 247 words: 74,612

For the Love of Money: A Memoir by Sam Polk

Bear Stearns, carried interest, Credit Default Swap, eat what you kill, fixed income, food desert, hiring and firing, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, Rosa Parks, SimCity

Wall Street started to look less like a bunch of smartest-guys-in-the-room and more like a group of men who’d secured a seat in a ring of chairs surrounding a huge pile of money, a pile that was growing not because of their skill, but because that’s what money did. The system was structured—through monetary policy, carried interest deductions, corporate tax breaks, and industry lobbyists—to ensure it. That might not sound like a crushing realization, but for me it was. I knew Wall Street wasn’t about doing something meaningful with your life, but I had seen it as a great coliseum for my young ambitions. Now it looked less like a meritocracy than an oligarchy.


pages: 318 words: 77,223

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

It is also about using tax and expenditure measures more actively to improve the quality of spending without unduly impacting the incentives that fuel innovation and entrepreneurship. In the United States, for example, this would include—going from the least to the most controversial—closing tax loopholes and cascading exemptions, increasing the taxation of carried interest earned by private equity firms and hedge funds, reforming inheritance taxation, streamlining home mortgage subsidies, and a higher marginal tax rate for the highest-income earners. It would also involve decisive steps to modernize a system of corporate taxation that is littered with anomalies, distortions, and misaligned incentives that undermine rather than promote economic growth—including by encouraging firms to spend a lot of money on “inversions,” that is, the purchase of foreign entities in order to geographically shift and reduce tax burdens while keeping productive operations as is.


pages: 253 words: 79,214

The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, call centre, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", joint-stock company, junk bonds, labour market flexibility, large denomination, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

SYNDICATED LOANS Having begun with short-term deposits, the Euromarket was quickly adapted to serve the needs of longer-term borrowers by the development of the syndicated loan. This is merely a large, long-term bank loan which a syndicate of banks club together to provide because no one bank wants to commit that much capital to any one borrower. Usually, these loans carry interest rates at a margin relating to LIBOR or EURIBOR, the equivalent measure for the Eurozone. Companies, countries or institutions with a good credit rating can sometimes borrow below LIBOR or even the London Interbank Bid Rate (LIBID), but borrowers whose financial position is not so healthy can expect to pay a considerable margin over LIBOR.


Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

Merchandise imports Interest due 1 2 3 2001 4 114 CRISIS AND DOLLARIZATION IN ECUADOR new commercial-bank loans). Moreover, in November 2000 the banking authorities eliminated a ceiling on fees that banks could change borrowers in lieu of interest, and removed a requirement that banks make provisions on loans carrying interest rates higher than 18 percent. In December 2000 the government transferred US$137 million to the Deposit Insurance Agency to enable it to make payments to insured depositors. In January 2001 the Central Government on-lent funds from the CAF to augment the resources of the bank liquidity fund, and made the Central Bank’s liquidity recycling facility fully operational.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Those who have been most successful at this ploy are private equity, venture capital and hedge fund managers. Typically, the managers of these funds are paid an annual management fee of 2 per cent of the fund’s net assets, plus a 20 per cent performance fee based on the fund’s profits for the year. This performance fee, or ‘carried interest’ as it is sometimes called, can amount to millions of pounds. The managers of these funds have persuaded the government to allow them to classify this performance fee as a capital gain, even though it is simply income earned for a job performed and should be taxed as regular earned income. The ostensible purpose of the lower capital gains rate is to compensate investors for the risk they take in investing their capital.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

That’s to make sure some money comes back right from the start and that managements cannot keep all the earnings for themselves by reducing accounting profits and paying themselves more. To recapture some of the broader market gains flowing from the injection of public money, one could place a modest new tax on interest, dividends, capital gains. “Carried interest,” the ludicrous special tax break for private equity and hedge funds that not only Republicans but Senator Schumer and other Democratic Congressional leaders continue to defend, should go as part of any political deal on a bailout. It is beyond crazy to ask American workers to subsidize firms that will soon be back trying to break up their firms and throw their rescuers out of work.


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

In total, over its initial twelve-year existence, Corporate Partners invested $1.35 billion in nine companies and received in return $2.99 billion, for a profit before fees and carried interest of $1.64 billion. Private-equity funds are judged on how well their investments perform over time, a calculation known as the internal rate of return, or IRR. Corporate Partners' IRR during its existence was 15 percent, net of fees and carried interest; investors received an annualized return of 15 percent per year. That placed its performance in the top quartile of such funds. BILL CLINTON'S VICTORY in the 1992 presidential election handed Lazard another unexpected problem: a glum and cranky Felix Rohatyn.

Steve also negotiated for himself and for Lazard one of the sweetest fee arrangements in capital-raising history. Since some of the Providence fund had been committed at the outset, Lazard was to raise only $175 million. For that work, the firm was to be paid a 1 percent placement fee, or $1.75 million, plus--and highly unusually--one-third of the General Partner's carried interest, or profits. Since the fund was enormously successful--returning to investors four times the amount of money invested--Steve figured the General Partner made $100 million, of which Lazard took around $33 million. But Steve had a side arrangement with Michel that gave him 8.25 percent of the firm's take, amounting to some $2.72 million for Steve alone, leaving the Lazard New York partners with around $30 million.


pages: 291 words: 91,783

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The administration accepted those proposals, and the Social Security tax rate went from 9.35 percent in 1981 to 15.3 percent by 1990. Two things about this. One, Social Security taxes are very regressive, among other things because they only apply to wage income (if you’re a hedge fund manager or a Wall Street investor and you make all your money in carried interest or capital gains, you don’t pay) and they are also capped, at this writing at around $106,000, meaning that wages above a certain level are not taxed at all. That means that a married couple earning $100,000 total will pay roughly the same amount of Social Security taxes that Lloyd Blankfein or Bill Gates will (if not more, depending on how the latter two structure their compensation).


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

By contrast, today’s super-rich are “moaning moguls,” to use James Surowiecki’s evocative term.27 Exhibit A for Surowiecki is Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and CEO of the private equity firm the Blackstone Group, whose wealth exceeds $10 billion. Schwarzman acts as if “he’s beset by a meddlesome, tax-happy government and a whiny, envious populace.” He has suggested that “it might be good to raise income taxes on the poor so they had ‘skin in the game,’ and that proposals to repeal the carried-interest tax loophole—from which he personally benefits—were akin to the German invasion of Poland.” Other examples from Surowiecki, “the venture capitalist Tom Perkins and Kenneth Langone, the cofounder of Home Depot, both compared populist attacks on the wealthy to the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews.” Surowiecki thinks that the change in attitudes has much to do with globalization.


Concentrated Investing by Allen C. Benello

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, Claude Shannon: information theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, family office, fixed income, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Louis Bachelier, margin call, merger arbitrage, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, prudent man rule, random walk, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, survivorship bias, technology bubble, Teledyne, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Siem sold the rig, which had cost $24.8 million just two years earlier, for $34.5 million. In the two years Siem’s syndicate had owned it, it had remained operating the whole time and generating income for the group. The almost $10 million capital gain represented a fantastic return on the $7 million that Siem’s group invested. Siem, who received a carried interest on the rig, and had also invested, made several million dollars personally. As he had predicted, the drilling market soon collapsed completely, and remained depressed for 10 years, but not before Siem got one more deal done. Diamond M Dragon and Common Brothers In 1981, Siem found the deal that would be key to his foray into the shipping world.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Mitt Romney, who ran for US President as the Republican candidate in 2012, paid a tax rate of only 14 per cent on his $22 million income in 2010, because most of it came from investments. The US advocacy group Citizens for Tax Justice has calculated that removing this subsidy to capital would raise $533 billion over a decade. Wealthy US hedge fund managers, four of whom paid themselves over $1 billion in 2015, also benefit from having their earnings treated as ‘carried interest’ and taxed at capital gains rates. Another selective tax rate that privileges the rich is the low or zero inheritance tax in many countries. US inheritance tax only kicks in on estates over $5 million. In the UK, the government has raised the threshold for such tax to £1 million for wealthy, home-owning couples (and there are ways of minimising the tax through trusts and the like).


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

They include the corporate raiders who, seeking to raise profits by cutting costs, have helped to do away with stable employment. They are the gentrifiers who have pushed real estate prices through the roof and made it harder for families like those of the young dancers to maintain a livelihood in the city. They are the beneficiaries of tax laws that give carried interest a major break and help to keep the public coffers low and the schools attended by the city’s poor underfunded, thus driving them into the streets and occasionally, when they are lucky, into the charity’s arms. But these men have been generous, and in exchange for their generosity, these issues will not come up.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

Facebook, Google and Amazon soared partly because they were built by hard-driving, brilliant visionaries, and partly because those visionaries were white men who had access to capital. The old feudal aristocracy kept its wealth through a combination of rules and norms, and so does today’s new aristocracy. There are the subsidies to the wealthy, like the carried interest tax loophole or the mortgage subsidy for yachts. By some calculations, corporate subsidies, credits and loopholes are 50 percent higher than entitlements to the poor (not including Medicare and Medicaid). Some of the other subsidies are outlandish: put a few goats on your golf course and you can classify it as farmland, as President Trump did, and save large sums in taxes.


pages: 407 words: 114,478

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio by William J. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, carried interest, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

(You can reach Treasury Direct at 1-800-722-2678 and www.publicdebt.treas.gov/sec/sectrdir.htm.) Even if you are purchasing a Treasury at auction through a brokerage firm, the fee is nominal—typically about $25. For a five-year note worth $10,000, this equals an annual expense of 0.05%. • High-quality corporate bonds and commercial paper. Corporates not only carry interest rate risk, but also credit risk. Even the highest-rated companies occasionally default. How often does this happen? Very rarely. According to bond-rating service Moody’s, since 1920 the rate of default for the highest-rated AAA bonds was zero, 0.04% per year for AA-rated, 0.09% for A-rated, and 0.25% for BBB-rated.


pages: 381 words: 112,674

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

In fact, they had the best of all worlds: a claim on a percentage of future investment gains, as well as a steady, guaranteed income that the limited partners paid as an annual management fee, usually 2 percent of all capital under management. The fee income, however, was pocket change. The real money came in the form of “the carried interest,” a quaint, confusing term that was shortened colloquially to “the carry,” which was 20 to 25 percent of the profits to be made investing Other People’s Money. If a starting kitty of $500 million became a portfolio of investments worth $5 billion, then a 20 percent carry would mean the venture guys would get, after repaying the original $500 million, a fifth of the $4.5 billion in profits, or $900 million, to divide among themselves, and their limited partners would get the remainder.


pages: 538 words: 121,670

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

People working within this system can thus believe—and do believe—that they’re doing nothing wrong by going along with how things work. Sometimes this going-along produces benefits that seem venally corrupt. Because of a loophole in the tax system (one that has existed since the 1960s), managers of hedge funds don’t pay ordinary income tax on the money they earn from hedge funds. Instead, their “carried interest” gets taxed at 15 percent.32 Thus, though the top ten hedge fund managers in 2009 made, on average, $1.87 billion, they paid a lower tax rate on that income than their secretaries.33 Obama promised to change this. But that change was blocked. Its very hard not to understand the very richest in our society enjoying the same tax rate as individuals earning between $8,000 and $34,000 as anything other than a kind of venal corruption.


pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

protects my neighbors Vaccination is a positive externality as it protects others from contracting a disease from the recipient. collection of insights Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Foreward by Warren Buffett, edited by Peter Kaufman. Expanded third edition, 2008. much of their income Read the evolving discussion of the taxation of so-called carried interest in Wikipedia and elsewhere on the Internet. The 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, was a substantial beneficiary. of national income The top 1 percent have about a third of taxable income, the next 9 percent have another third, and the bottom 90 percent have the remaining third. 20 percent or so To get a simplistic feel for the numbers, government received $3.25 trillion in income in 2015 and GNP was $18 trillion.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Warren Buffett famously took on this issue in 2011 in a New York Times piece, noting that while the taxes he paid the previous year amounted to 17.4 percent of his income—or $6,938,744 total—the tax burden on other people in his office averaged 36 percent.32 (For his assistant Debbie Bosanek it was 35.8 percent.)33 That’s because Buffett makes money from things like “carried interest” on investments, capital gains from selling stocks, and so on. Like most billionaires and many millionaires, he declares very little “earned” income but a lot of asset wealth gains. As Buffett says, “these and other blessings are showered upon us [meaning, the rich] much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species.


pages: 495 words: 136,714

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

The tangle of official obligations stretched back at least forty years to the bad behavior of the Stuart king Charles II, whose “stop” of the payments from the Exchequer lingered as an obligation of more than half a million pounds still due from the Treasury. The long-term loans from the 1690s remained on the books. That money, the price of the Nine Years’ War, had grown into over £12 million due, carrying interest rates of up to 10 percent over terms that extended for up to a hundred years. These were the “irredeemables,” so called because they could not simply be paid off during their run. More than £11 million more in long-term debt had piled on during the Tory years—much of it in redeemable lottery loans that could be paid off whenever the government could find the funds.


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

This is because investment firms had sold off virtually all their risky technology holdings to investors before the dot-com bubble burst. In sharp contrast, at the peak of the real estate market, Wall Street was up to its ears in housing-related debt. As noted earlier, in a declining interest rate environment, investors were hungry for yield, and these mortgage-based securities carried interest rates that were higher than comparably rated corporate and government debt. This tempted investment banks, such as Bear Stearns, to sell these bonds to investors with the promise of higher yield with comparable safety.24 Although many investment banks held these bonds for their own account, their holdings of subprime debt grew substantially when they were forced to take back the faltering subprime funds they sold to investors because of complaints that investors were not fully informed of their risks.25 Risks to the financial system were compounded when AIG, the world’s largest insurance company, offered to insure hundreds of billions of dollars of these mortgages against default through an instrument called the credit default swap.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

This, then, is among the forces that fill the void created by the ignorance of the American public and many of its elected representatives. And it produces direct results, one of which is legislation that is overly favorable to financial institutions. To choose one example that was controversial at the time of this book’s writing, private equity firms managed to persuade Congress to treat their “carried interest” in companies as capital gains rather than ordinary income, resulting in a substantial tax break (15 percent instead of up to 45 percent). Many, even a few financial leaders such as Warren Buffett, viewed this as so egregiously inequitable that an opposition movement has formed against it. Because of America’s international reach and power, the revolving door to the financial community is a phenomenon with global consequences.


pages: 532 words: 141,574

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

Well, the party, I fear, has fallen on evil days. This generation—it’s almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them. The Baby Jesus is managing the portfolio of earthly affairs, and nobody begrudges Him the carried interest . . .” Suddenly, and from the cookie’s point of view, rudely, chomping into it and scattering crumbs. “Sure you won’t have one, they’re quite . . . No? All right, thanks, don’t mind if I . . .” Grabbing another, two or three actually, “I just spoke with some people. A most puzzling conversation, I have to say.


pages: 1,544 words: 391,691

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur, Antonio Salvi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, ASML, asset light, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, delta neutral, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, impact investing, implied volatility, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, performance metric, Potemkin village, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk/return, shareholder value, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The management company, in other words the partners of the LBO funds, is paid on the basis of a percentage of the funds invested (c. 2% of invested funds) and a percentage of the capital gains made (often close to 20% of the capital gain) above a minimum rate of return of 6% to 8% (the hurdle rate), known as carried interest. Some funds decide to list their shares on the stock market, like Blackstone did in 2007,5 while others such as 3i and Wendel are listed for historical reasons. 4. The lenders For smaller transactions (less than €10m), there is a single bank lender, often the target company’s main bank or a small group of its usual bankers (club deal).

cancellation of shares cap, interest rate options CAPEX see capital expenditure analysis capex facility capital cost of “frozen” subdividing warrants raising weighted average cost method see also debt capital; shareholder equity; working capital capital asset pricing model (CAPM) capital charge, value creation capital decrease see capital reduction capital employed book value difference definition extreme volatility of goodwill gross growth rate market value policy put option on ratio to operating profit restating items of return on risk of solvency terminal value based on value of very high risk of see also operating assets capital-employed analysis, balance sheet capital expenditure analysis (CAPEX) capital expenditures calculating cash flow and financial analysis purpose of stability principle wealth creation working capital yield to maturity capital gains capital gains tax capital increases cost defensive measures definition EPS decrease methods share issue start-ups capital leases capital losses, assets capital market line CAPM relationship risk-free assets and capital markets capital payments capital rationing, PVI and capital reduction choosing method exceptional dividends capital structure change as signal choosing of competitors design of leverage effect modern theory of parameters use perfect capital markets policy capitalisation discounting factors real estate acquisition shares capitalisation factor CAPM see capital asset pricing model captive insurance carried interest, LBO funds carrybacks carryforwards, tax loss carrying value, consolidated accounts carve-outs cascade structure cash balance sheet buying movements in as profitability indicator providing shareholders with recession conditions wealth distinction cash acquisition cash assets “cash at hand” cash balances centralisation of cost of capital investing cash budgeting cash certificates cash culture cash disbursements from expenditure cash equivalents cash flow accounting for analysis of earnings bonds business plan horizon centralisation of classifying company’s company finance defining discounting earnings to effective annual rate equilibrium between forecasting horizons future investment generation negotiation NPV calculation operating activities option pricing present value of pros and cons of approach reason in terms of reinvesting rights/commitments share issue start-ups types value of security see also free cash flow; funds from operations “cash flow fade” method cash flow hedges cash flow return on investment (CFROI) cash flow statement financial analysis income statement differences operating activities and cash flow value at maturity net asset value cash generating units (CGUs) cash inflows, shareholders’ equity cash management basic concepts optimising based on value dates within groups cash mutual funds cash offers cash payment, mergers and acquisitions cash pooling cash ratio, company finance cash return to shareholders cash surpluses, account balancing cat bonds CBs see convertible bonds CDO see collateralised debt obligation CDs see certificates of deposit CDS see credit default swap central banks centralised cash management CEO see chief executive officer certainty equivalent, investment analysis certificates of deposit (CDs) CFO see chief financial officer CFROI see cash flow return on investment CGUs see cash generating units chairman of the board role change-of-control provisions changes in working capital chaotic functions characteristic line, financial securities charges see cost(s) chartists cheque payments chief executive officer (CEO) chief financial officer (CFO) flexibility roles strategy see also financial manager chirographic creditors CIB see corporate and investment banking Claessens, S.


pages: 604 words: 165,488

Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World's Richest Man by Jonathan Conlin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, anti-communist, banking crisis, British Empire, carried interest, cotton gin, Ernest Rutherford, estate planning, Fellow of the Royal Society, light touch regulation, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Network effects, Pierre-Simon Laplace, rent-seeking, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Exactly what kind is unclear because the letter was lost or stolen from Gulbenkian’s secretary, D. H. Young, in February 1920, resulting in an explosion of temper that left Gulbenkian with ‘no heart for business’. CSG to NSG, 6 February 1920. LDN02574. An earlier letter refers to a 15 per cent carried interest in Royal Dutch-Shell’s 60 per cent SEP shareholding; CSG refers to ‘5% which you had ceded and the 10% which I got from the French’. CSG to Deterding, 17 July 1919. SHA, 195/175b. Of course, CSG enjoyed carried shareholdings and overall sales commissions in tandem in many Royal Dutch-Shell subsidiaries, so perhaps he had both. 43.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Where they were part of the LBO, existing management claimed to know how to fix or improve the business—but only if given a large equity interest. It was legal blackmail. Buyout firms collected a fee, typically 1 percent of each purchase. In addition, the buyout firm charged an annual management fee, around 1–2 percent, on the investors’ funds, managed plus 20 percent carried interest, receiving a share of any investment gains on disposition. They charged annual monitoring and director’s fees. During negotiations, Gerald Saltarelli, chairman of Houdaille, argued that KKR should not be entitled to any fee for buying the company. Kohlberg argued he was entitled to a fee: “I’m an investment banker.”17 Lenders got high interest rates as well as substantial fees.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

The last thing we want today is to make it more expensive for people to work. A second step would be a modest increase in taxes on capital. Eliminating provisions that reduce the effective taxation of capital, such as generous depreciation allowances and the advantageous tax status of private equity and carried interest, would be one way of achieving this. Additionally, moderately higher corporate income taxes would directly increase the marginal tax rates faced by capital owners, further closing the gap between the taxation of capital and labor. It is important to simultaneously close tax loopholes, including schemes that minimize tax liabilities of multinational corporations by shifting their accounting profits across jurisdictions; otherwise, corporate income taxes could be avoided and would not be fully effective.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The ATO is demanding that the Luxembourg and Cayman Island shell companies pay taxes, interest, and penalties due Australia.76 The lesson for the United States is this: The ATO’s Texas Pacific tax bill presumes logically that the proceeds of the Myer transaction be taxed as ordinary income, rather than as capital gains, as lobbied by Texas Pacific. In December 2010, the ATO determined that since buying and selling firms is the main activity of enterprises such as Texas Pacific, proceeds on such transactions are taxable as ordinary business income, not as capital gains.77 This is the same logic involved in the carried-interest debate in the US Congress, where reform is presently gridlocked by Congressional Republicans. Restore Financial Market Discipline by Eliminating Red Queens The American economy needs to be protected from the baker’s dozen Red Queens that have emerged in recent decades of willful neglect of antitrust laws.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

The Russian also made a large investment in Twitter.11 Lurking behind all of this cash, domestic and foreign, was the angel that had been there since the very beginning: the U.S. government. American financiers had so much to invest because of a U.S. tax code that—thanks to five decades of sustained lobbying—strongly advantaged those who made money from money. The capital gains tax stood at 15 percent. The carried-interest deduction stood firm, despite periodic attempts to abolish it. VCs, hedge fund managers, and private equity funds alike were able to rake in billions for managing other people’s investments, and call all of it their “capital gains.” Then there were the taxes on corporate revenue. For more than fifty years, the U.S. had allowed American corporations operating overseas to defer taxation on profits earned in non-U.S. markets.


pages: 725 words: 221,514

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

He argued that the fact that Deuteronomy allows usury under any circumstances demonstrates that this could not have been a universal “spiritual law,” but was a political law created for the specific ancient Israeli situation, and therefore, that it could be considered irrelevant in different ones. 29. And in fact, this is what “capital” originally meant. The term itself goes back to Latin capitale, which meant “funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money, or money carrying interest” (Braudel 1992:232). It appears in English in the mid–sixteenth century largely as a term borrowed from Italian bookkeeping techniques (Cannan 1921, Richard 1926) for what remained when one squared property, credits, and debts; though until the nineteenth century, English sources generally preferred the word “stock”—in part, one suspects, because “capital” was so closely associated with usury. 30.


pages: 1,042 words: 266,547

Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham, David Dodd

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, full employment, Greenspan put, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, prudent man rule, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, secular stagnation, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two and twenty, zero-coupon bond

By the way, the previous approach to accounting for stock options was even odder: options granted with a strike price equal to the market price had no expense impact, but those granted below market would, in some cases, result in an expense every year thereafter that the underlying stock rose. There is equal confusion to be found in the FASB approach to accounting for derivatives, hedging, pensions, leases, and recognition of profits for carried interests, to name a few. Now companies can even record a profit if their debt gets downgraded. Sometimes accounting rules seem designed to carry us very far from economic reality, and some managers are quite amenable to taking investors on such a journey. Having analyzed the historical record, the second and far greater challenge is to determine “the utility of this past record as an indication of future earnings.”


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, asset allocation, bike sharing, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, distributed generation, distributed ledger, diversification, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, zero-coupon bond

Cullen, 118 F.2d 651 (5th Cir. 1941), rev'g 41 BTA 1042 Marrs McLean, 120 F.2d 942 (5th Cir. 1941), cert. denied, 314 U.S. 670 Fred T. Hogan, 1 TCM 208 (1942), aff'd, 141 F.2d 92 (5th Cir. 1944), cert. denied, 323 U.S. 710 Net profits Kirby Petroleum Co., 326 U.S. 599 (1946) Thomas A. O'Donnell, 303 U.S. 370 (1938) Carried interest Abercrombie Co., 162 F.2d 338 (5th Cir. 1947), aff'g 7 TC 120 (1946) (Nonacq.) Donald McMurray, 60 F.2d 843 (10th Cir. 1935), cert. denied, 287 U.S. 664 Carved-out oil payments P. G. Lake, Inc., 356 U.S. 260 (1958) Murphy J. Foster, 324 F.2d 702 (5th Cir. 1963) 9.12 PRODUCTION COSTS OF BOOKS AND CREATIVE PROPERTIES IRC §263A Exemption for freelance authors, artists, and playwrights IRC §263A(h) 9.13 DEDUCTING THE COST OF PATENTS OR COPYRIGHTS Patent and copyright Reg. §1.167(a)-6(a) Depreciation deduction Associated Partners, Inc., 4 TC 979 (1945) Rev.