A Scotsman and business writer named Bertie Charles Forbes founded Forbes magazine in 1917 and was famous for epigrams on the business of life. [..] Forbes died in 1954, long before the current batch of plunderers had begun amassing their fortunes and depleting the treasure of others. But he knew their kind when he said: “The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.”
This book is really, just amazing...
By mid-2022, almost four hundred ten thousand corporate retirees were trusting Athene to provide them with a prosperous retirement. They’d been given no choice in the matter—their former companies had sold their pensions to Athene [Apollo, Leon Black] without giving them the right to object. #privateEquity#theseAreThePlunderers
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The benefits these companies reaped from the transactions were clear: a short-term monetary gain paid to them by Athene and the long-term benefit of not having to cover the payments they’d promised their retirees. Transferring their pension obligations to Athene [Apollo/Black Owned insurance ] meant corporations like Alcoa, Bristol Myers, General Electric, and Lockheed Martin were off the hook to their former workers.
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These pension deals had a telling name, however. They were called “pension risk transfers,” and therein was their problem. The companies selling their pension obligations were transferring to another entity the risks associated with making these payments for years to come. A good thing for the companies, of course, but beneficial to the pensioners? Not so fast.
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“.. by 2021, white-collar crime prosecutions stood at an annualized rate of 4,727, or roughly half the level of twenty years earlier. Of those cases, only about 10 % were against financial institutions; more cases involved identity theft and fraud in federal programs and healthcare.”
Too Big To Fail. Gretchen Morgensen & Joshua Rosner characterize the 1990s/2000’s : “An exceptional criminogenic environment” was how Bill Black, the federal government’s director of litigation during the savings and loan crisis, characterized the mortgage mess. “There were no criminal referrals from the regulators. No fraud working groups. No national task force. No effective punishment of the elites here,” he said. “
Late 1991, John Garamendi as then-Insurance Commissioner for California handed ex-Drexel managers, Leon Black et al, a huge payday:
“The Apollo partners [Leon Black et al] were the elated ones. Under the terms of the sale [Executive Life] , Altus would ultimately receive almost $6 billion worth of bonds for around $3 billion.”
John Garamendi. -- man, you did policy holders 'dirty' as California Insurance Commissioner in 1991:
"In any case, the advantage given to [Leon] Black’s partners by [John] Garamendi led to a terrible outcome for Executive Life’s policyholders. He’d allow assets needed to fulfill Executive Life’s promises to be sold off for far less than they were really worth. ..
What’s more, whether the insurer needed to be taken over at all was questioned in a 1994 article published in the Journal of Financial Economics, which concluded that, thanks to the rebounding junk bond market, Executive Life would have been solvent again within a year of its takeover.
Garamendi had sold at the bottom of the market. That was pretty much exactly where the ex-Drexelites had hoped to buy, propelling Apollo to its start.
1991 #johnGaramendi: Well before Garamendi commandeered Executive Life, he’d been meeting with [Leon] Black’s group about what to do with the company. From the start, the insurance commissioner had insisted on “a total solution” to the insurer’s problems, meaning that the same buyer would have to acquire both the life insurance operations and the massive investment portfolio.
"A second measure, recorded by the Federal Reserve, underscores how much financial ground the American middle class has lost since 1989. Back then, the middle 60 % of U.S. households by income—a measure often used to define the middle class—held 36 % of the nation’s wealth, more than double the 17 % controlled by the very wealthy 1 % of the population. ..
"Even though the nation’s debt markets far exceed the stock market in dollar value, regulatory officials have focused much more closely on policing activities in stock trading than in bond transactions. You almost never hear of insider trading cases involving debt issues, for example."
"Even though the nation’s debt markets far exceed the stock market in dollar value, regulatory officials have focused much more closely on policing activities in stock trading than in bond transactions. You almost never hear of insider trading cases involving debt issues, for example."
“No matter. Profiting from problems you’ve created is a long-standing tradition on Wall Street. For example, investment bankers are famous for advising corporate clients whose acquisitions don’t work out to sell companies they had advised them to buy in the first place. Best of all, advisers earn fees on both deals.”
'Then [Thomas] McCann opined on [Eli, Leon Black’s father] Black’s larger legacy. “One good way to kill off a company is to approach it as though it has no life, no age, no spirit, no constituencies that matter,” he wrote. “In other words, to approach it as Eli Black did, as though it were nothing more than numbers.”
Much like the plunderers of today.'
Did we know this : [Leon] Black’s climb to the pinnacle of New York City society had not been preordained. Yes, he had been raised the son of Eli Black, a former corporate CEO known for his contributions to the arts in New York City. But tragedy struck the family in February 1975, when Black, the chief executive of a conglomerate called United Brands, committed suicide just as his involvement in a significant international corporate bribery scandal was about to emerge.
“In addition to taking down the president of Honduras, the fraud helped produce a new law banning such payoffs—the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.
The suicide occurred while Leon Black was finishing up at Harvard Business School.