Displaying items by tag: private equity

Bridgewater is the world’s largest hedge fund and their current CEO stepped down in a recent memo. Former CEO David McCormick is planning on running for a US Senate seat. Stepping into the leadership role will be Nir Bar Dea and Mark Bertolini in a shared leadership role. Bridgewater has had three different CEOs since Ray Dalio stepped down in his capacity as chief executive. Bridgewater gained a cult-like following for its radical transparency in the financial world where individuals rate and score their co-workers. Bar Dea is a relatively young executive in the hedge fund industry, but the pairing is seen as complementary in their shared CEO role. Bridgewater manages over $150 billion in pensions.

FINSUM: Hedge funds made a huge splash in 2021 by avoiding a lot of public turmoil and investing privately, we’ll see if that trend and those returns continue in 2022.

Former Harvard bankruptcy professor Elizabeth Warren is trying to reestablish support of tighter regulation on yet another financial industry sector. Looking to alleviate financial irresponsibility, the bill restricts PE from enforcing new loans on companies in order to withdraw dividends. Additionally, the bill creates a number of protections for workers that prohibit outsourcing and secure severance pay in the event of bankruptcy. Companies like Sports Authority, Shopco, and Gymboree all filed for bankruptcy under PE the debt Warren is trying to prohibit. Warren failed to draw the appeal across the aisle previously with the bill, but is hoping to gain more traction this time around. Opponents say the bill will draw down on private funding for new and small businesses and could harm the ability to make new hires or expand their workforce.

FINSUM: Regulation like this will undoubtedly harm some small businesses but the protection and benefits could out way those restrictions, however the bill won’t likely get enough traction in its current status to reach the oval office.

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(Silicon Valley)

Venture capital has always been a hard-to-access asset class for advisors and their clients. The funds tend to have high minimums and long lock-up periods with extremely low liquidity. That said, returns are historically strong, and VC can often be an un-correlated asset class whose returns are differentiated in scope and timing from publicly-traded markets. Because of the lack of liquidity and easy access it has been an asset class that has largely been overlooked by advisors and high net worth individuals. However, there are some ways to access venture capital through liquid funds which are likely worth a look.

FINSUM: Not only can returns because excellent and uncorrelated, but VC is likely to become a more important asset class in the next few years. Why? Because more and more large companies are staying private for longer, which means investors need to ways to access the asset class in order to participate in the total return of the market.

(New York)

In a topic that wreaks of moral hazard, private equity firms are increasingly the beneficiaries of government bailout funds. The situation is similar to the Crisis-era bailout of Chrysler, which was owned by Cerberus Capital Management. The Financial Times summed up the situation best, saying “Should they use government money to support companies whose deep-pocketed private equity owners have often thinned out their balance sheets and left the slimmest financial cushion?”, continuing with a quote from a professor at Oxford, “We cannot have a world in which one can borrow to earn more and pay little taxes if things go up and when things go down then the taxpayer comes to the rescue”.

FINSUM: Private equity will probably get more bailout money as this lockdown rolls on, but the Democrats will surely attach a lot of strings to it.