LL is worth buying on a big pullback. The company is doing well.<\/p>\n
I continue to like Nike (NKE) — nice results last night and APO, BX and KKR. Those three are having a great year. Wait till you see the dividends they’ll pay in the first quarter of 2014.<\/p>\n
Favorite guru. It’s a neat, profitable business. <\/strong>You buy a building, get financing from the bank (say 75%), then you “syndicate” the remaining 25% to your friends. You pay them a “preferred” return — say 8% and split the returns 75% to them and 25% to yourself after your investors have received 12% IRR and had their investment repaid in full. The rewards formula is not consistent among syndicators. Some are more greedy than others. Some take 50% above a preferred return plus performance fees, plus, plus.<\/span> I sent one deal to my real estate guru last night, asking him for his opinion. I got back four words, which I’ll cherish:<\/p>\n Horrendous terms; ramshackle property.<\/span><\/p>\n Six simple ways to keep your iPhone battery powered up. <\/strong>The iPhone 5S has a bigger battery and lasts longer. It works all day for me. Here are six ways to keep it powered up. Click here.<\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Weekend reading:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n + AIG CEO Robert Benmosche Compares Bonus Criticism to Lynch Mobs by <\/em>Matt Taibbi of the Rolling Stone.<\/p>\n Robert Benmosche, CEO of AIG.<\/em><\/p>\n AIG has a lengthy history of producing some of the biggest tools on Wall Street. Former CEO Maurice “Hank” Greenberg was considered one of the world’s preeminent unapologetic narcissists even before he sued the government for providing an insufficiently generous bailout.<\/strong> Joe Cassano, former chief of AIG’s financial products division, was another. First, he arrogantly blew off the accountants who warned him his portfolio of hundreds of billions in uncollateralized bets might destroy the world. Then, after it all went kablooey, he tiptoed back to D.C. (after first being assured of not being prosecuted, mind you) from his lavish four-story townhouse in London just long enough to tell the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that he had absolutely nothing to be sorry about<\/strong> and they could bite him and his hundreds of millions in earnings if they disagreed.<\/p>\n Now a third AIG executive enters the pantheon of tone-deaf AIG bigwigs: CEO Robert Benmosche, who just told the Wall Street Journal <\/em>that the post-crash public outcry over the use of bailout money to pay bonuses to executives in Cassano’s Financial Products unit was comparable to \u2013 get this \u2013 lynchings in the deep south.<\/strong> … Read Taibbi’s full article here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n + How Detroit went broke:<\/strong> For the full article, click here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n + The Shadow Commander.<\/strong> If there’s one article you need to read on the Middle East, this is it. It tells the story of Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian operative who has been reshaping the Middle East. Now he\u2019s directing Assad\u2019s war in Syria. Once you read this long, engrossing New Yorker article, you’ll wonder whether we (the U.S.) can ever achieve anything there.<\/p>\n A former C.I.A. officer calls Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, For the full New Yorker story, click here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n + Looting Public Pensions: A New Think-Tank Study<\/strong> by Matt Taibbi. This first piece is from his blog:<\/p>\n So we have a new feature out today, “Looting the Pension Funds<\/a>,” that looks at the blame game being played with state and municipal fiscal crises and the hiring of ultra-expensive “alternative investments” like hedge funds as a key trend in an evolving pension reform movement. The story looks at the role in the organized nationwide “pension reform” movement played by right-wing financiers like former Enron billionaire John Arnold and fee-hungry Wall Street honchos like Third Point billionaire Dan Loeb<\/a>.<\/p>\n I was originally turned on to this story by old friend David Sirota, who wrote a massive report on the subject for a new progressive think tank, the Institute for America’s Future<\/a>. We talked about the subject a lot in the last months and timed it so that his report would also be released today. I urge everyone to read his report (you can find it here<\/a>), which goes into far more detail than my piece did, especially about Arnold and his relationship with “centrist” organizations like Pew Charitable Trusts.<\/p>\n We both looked extensively at Rhode Island as a kind of test case for a lot of the issues we’re talking about. For more in-depth coverage of the Rhode Island pension crisis, I strongly recommend that readers visit a site called GolocalProv.com<\/a>, which has done outstanding work in trying to follow the math in their state’s highly confusing pension mess. Former Providence Journal<\/em> reporter Mike Stanton also extensively covered the issue \u2013 you can see an example of his work here<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is the beginning of the main article:<\/p>\n Illustration by Victor Juhasz<\/em><\/p>\n In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo \u2013 an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist \u2013 the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.<\/p>\n Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn’t even know how to react. “She’s Yale, Harvard, Oxford \u2013 she worked on Wall Street,” says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. “Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about.”<\/p>\n Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island’s 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase showered her with money, with more than $247,000 coming from New York contributors alone. A shadowy organization called EngageRI, a public-advocacy group of the 501(c)4 type whose donors were shielded from public scrutiny by the infamous Citizens United decision, spent $740,000 promoting Raimondo’s ideas. Within Rhode Island, there began to be whispers that Raimondo had her sights on the presidency. Even former Obama right hand and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed to Rhode Island as an example to be followed in curing pension woes.<\/p>\n What few people knew at the time was that Raimondo’s “tool kit” wasn’t just meant for local consumption. The dynamic young Rhodes scholar was allowing her state to be used as a test case for the rest of the country, at the behest of powerful out-of-state financiers with dreams of pushing pension reform down the throats of taxpayers and public workers from coast to coast. One of her key supporters was billionaire former Enron executive John Arnold \u2013 a dickishly ubiquitous young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generation’s Koch brothers, and who for years had been funding a nationwide campaign to slash benefits for public workers.<\/p>\n Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo’s strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion \u2013 14 percent of the state fund \u2013 to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb’s Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina’s Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer’s Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 “Urban Innovator” of the year.<\/p>\n The state’s workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn’t know.<\/p>\n You can read the entire blog\u00a0 here<\/strong><\/a> and article here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Great recent New Yorker cartoons:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n![\"AIGCEO\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/AIGCEO.jpg\")
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\n![\"HowDetroitWentBroke\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/HowDetroitWentBroke.jpg\")
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\nthe “most powerful operative in the Middle East today.”
\nIllustration by Krzysztof Domaradzki.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"FatHedgefund\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/FatHedgefund.jpg\")
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![\"CreatorsBlock\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/CreatorsBlock.jpg\")
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<\/a><\/p>\n![\"HarryNewton\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/HarryNewton.jpg\")
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