Friday, January 20, 2012

CNN to Spotlight PEU's

On the heels of WaPo and NYT's private equity puff pieces comes CNN's GPS. CNN World stated:

On GPS this Sunday at 10am and 1pm EST: In light of Mitt Romney’s role at Bain Capital, we take a rare look inside the world of “private equity.” What is this industry? How does it make so much money? Is it really all about firing workers?

Fareed speaks to a pioneer of the industry: David Rubenstein of The Carlyle Group, the world’s biggest private equity firm.
Rare is a critical examination of private equity's financial game playing, made more opaque by obtuse language, liquidity event, leveraged recapitalization, sponsor,  economic net income, carried interest,

PEU Report covered private equity underwriters (PEU's) since 2006.  Fareed is free to ask questions about Carlyle's past sins, but he'd do the public the most service exposing details of their latest S-1/A.

Carlyle Group (NASDAQ) shareholders are like one time election voters.  Give Carlyle's DBD founders cash and get no rights.  I expect Fareed to spend more time on panda's and the Washington Monument than LifeCare, SemGroup, Synagro, Brintons' or pension "pay to play."  Media knows the price for PEU access.  It's puff questions.  Nothing about puffery.

Update 1-23-12:  Bloomberg had the CNN PEU transcript the day before the program ran and produced a nice fluff piece for Carlyle's David Rubenstein.  That should keep reported access.  As for the show itself, Fareed omitted panda's, but the cameraman's posterior might be sore from the repeated ramming home of Rubenstein's Washington Monument donation.  Fareed gave David plenty of air time for his philanthropic deeds.  Nothing about any of Carlyle's past sins.