Tag: private equity

Greg Mankiw’s Contorted Defense of Mitt Romney

By James Kwak

It’s really hard to defend the carried interest exemption (the one that allows private equity and venture capital partners to pay tax on their share of fund profits at capital gains rather than ordinary income rates). You have to give Greg Mankiw a hand: he sure gave it a good shot in the Times this weekend.

Mankiw’s general point makes a lot of sense. He argues that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish returns from labor and returns from investment, using five examples of people who buy a house for $800,000 and later sell it for $1,000,000. For example:

“Carl is a real estate investor and a carpenter. He buys a dilapidated house for $800,000. After spending his weekends fixing it up, he sells it a couple of years later for $1 million. Once again, the profit is $200,000.”

In this case, although some of Carl’s profit is due to his labor, all of it gets treated as capital gains by the tax code. In a perfect theoretical tax world, you would divide Carl into two people, the investor and the carpenter, and the investor would pay the carpenter some amount for his labor; the carpenter would pay ordinary income tax on that amount (and the investor would deduct it from his taxable profits). But that’s not how we do things.

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Private Equity and “Job Creation”

By James Kwak

The phrase “job creation” always makes me a little queasy. The personal computer has probably contributed to the elimination of tens of millions of clerical jobs, yet I think most of us feel that computers are a good thing: they make people more productive, meaning more goods and services for everyone . . . and hopefully the people who lost those jobs will find work doing something else. In boom periods, like the 1990s, it seems to work, at least for most people, but I doubt that there’s any proof that productivity-increasing innovation always increases employment. But this line of thinking quickly leads to questions like whether the invention of the automatic toll booth is a good thing (because it eliminates what must be a pretty unpleasant job) or a bad thing (because it results in the layoff of people who may not have good alternatives), and those questions are above my pay grade.

Anyway, job creation these days usually refers to growing companies, making stuff people want, which tend to hire new workers—leaving aside the question of whether the products they make are causing other people to lose their jobs. This is the kind of job creation that Mitt Romney (and the private equity industry, at least publicly) wants to be associated with.

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What Is Private Equity?

By James Kwak

Recently, a lot of the political debate has been about whether private equity—and by extension Mitt Romney—is good or bad. The argument on one side is that private equity firms are vultures who destroy firms to make money; on the other, that private equity is just capitalism at work, creates value, and creates jobs.

A private equity firm is an asset management company. It creates investment funds that raise most of their money from outside investors (pension funds, insurance companies, rich people, etc.), and then manages those funds. As opposed to a mutual fund, however, instead of buying individual stocks, these funds usually make large investments either in private companies or in public companies that they “take private” (more on that in a minute). While mutual funds and most hedge funds try to make money by guessing where securities prices will go in the future, private equity funds try to make money by taking control of companies and actively managing them. (There is a bit of a spectrum here, since mutual funds and hedge funds can exercise pressure on company management and private equity funds do take minority positions, but that’s the ideal-typical distinction.)

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Shareholder Value for Beginners

Ever wondered how the private equity industry works? The New York Times has the story for you. (Thanks to a reader for pointing it out to me.) Yves Smith has a summary of the juicy bits.

The game is basically this. Thomas H. Lee Partners bought Simmons in 2003 for $327 million in real money and $745 million in debt. But that’s debt issued by Simmons, not by THL. To buy the company, they needed to pay the previous owners $1.1 billion in real money. The previous owners didn’t care where the money came from, so as long as THL could find banks or bond investors willing to lend $745 million to Simmons, the deal could go through. Since THL put up 100% of the equity in the new version of Simmons, they owned 100% of the company.

In 2004, Simmons borrowed more real money (by issuing new debt) and promptly gave $137 million of that real money to THL as a special dividend. In 2007, Simmons borrowed $300 million more in real money and paid $238 million of it to THL. So THL got $375 million in special dividends in exchange for its $327 million investment (plus an additional $28 million in fees). Simmons is now going into bankruptcy, unable to pay off all that debt, a casualty of the collapse in the housing market (houses => beds).

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