Convicted financial manipulator Michael Milken hosts the American version of Davos, thus he rubs elbows with insiders of the American branded Government-Corporate Monstrosity. As a thought leader of our "greed is great" economy where the spoils go to a select few, Milken is missing but one thing. It's the right to return to his former playground, which morphed from leveraged buyouts to private equity.
Those close to President Donald Trump are reportedly pushing the idea of pardoning Michael Milken, the junk-bond king who personified the 1980s buy-and-destroy era.
Bloomberg News reports that support for pardoning Milken is coming from Trump confidants including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former White House spokesman Anthony Scaramucci, son-in-law Jared Kushner and attorney Rudy Giuliani, who prosecuted Milken when he was U.S. attorney in the late 1980s.
Sponsors of Milken's 2018 conference include Apollo (Leon Black), Ares Capital, Bain Capital, Blue Mountain Capital, Citadel, CVC Partners, Generation Investment Management (Al Gore), Leonard Green Partners, Moelis, and TCW (Carlyle Group affiliate). The conference underwriter was WorldQuant.
The buy, bleed and flip era is here thanks to private equity underwriters. They would love to have their founder rehabilitated.
President Trump is just the man to rewrite Milken's history of harm. Trump is the great salesman, the P. T. Barnum for the greed and leverage boys.
He rehabbed the Kushner name with its interesting history.
Jared’s father, Charles, spent 14 months in federal prison for tax evasion and witness tampering connected to a blackmail scheme against his sister’s husband. Jared’s sister, Nicole Meyer, is under federal investigation after promoting her family’s connections to the White House while soliciting Chinese investors for a pair of luxury apartment towers Kushner Cos. is building in Jersey City.Jared and Ivanka spoke at a Milken Institute event on December 8, 2014. The event was billed as a conversation with the couple, who are now key White House advisors.
I suggest a huge statue of Michael Milken be erected on the Washington Mall. He is that foundational to our current leadership in business, the White House and Congress.
Update 9-24-18: Milken's PEU peers were well represented at another gathering of the world's powerful, The Annual Bilderberg Meeting held this summer in Turin, Italy. Perhaps they talked about pardoning their founding father of leveraged greed.
Update 10-22-19: Bloomberg reported
a Centerview staffer worked with a peer at Moelis to sell insider
information and the pair received over $1 million for their dastardly
deeds.
Update 2-18-20: President Trump pardoned Milken, the purveyor of greed that so many emulate today.
Update 9-28-21: Milken got mention as a bad guy in 2010 for rumor mongering and naked short selling.
Update 11-26-23: The World Tribune reported:
Given all that has happened to this country over the past 35-odd years since Michael Milken, Leon Black and Jeffrey Epstein first appeared on the national scene, it is more than appropriate to ask out loud just how much influence this unholy trinity has had and continues to have over America’s political, corporate and cultural elites.There is no crime amongst elites that cannot be forgiven.
