ZeroHedge's Tyler Durden reported on KKR's remaining founders stepping down as co-CEOs to serve as co-chairmen of KKR's board of directors. KKR is a legendary private equity underwriter (PEU).
In the piece Durden wrote:
Despite those early criticisms of private equity as a gang of corporate raiders, the industry has earned for itself a hallowed position within the landscape of Wall Street, generating massive profits for investors and employees alike.
Massive profits for employees? I worked for two private equity affiliates in my career and never received any of their massive profits. Our sponsors did reduce headcount, cut paid time off, slashed the number of holidays and holiday pay, eliminated valued services, cut workspace and consistently made health insurance a crappier benefit. Raises were nearly nonexistent. Over-reliance on bad technology caused great harm to our once nationally recognized quality.
PEU pioneers Kravis and Roberts added billions in healthcare costs (HCA), gave the public surprise medical billing and lobbied Congress to take toothless action against this dastardly practice.
Henry Kravis' and George Roberts' greed metastasized into economic cancer for the middle class. The following statement is from a major business reporter and is over ten years old:
I have seen so many people -- particularly those in their 50s - 70s -- taken apart by what has happened in their industry as greed has hollowed out the economy. These are people took pride in their jobs and held themselves to this invisible standard that we all just took for granted, but is being wiped out.One can substitute Kravis and Roberts for PEU Rubenstein as the policy making billionaires kept their preferred "carried interest" taxation while the middle class got shafted. How will Kravis and Roberts rig the system in their favor as co-chairmen of KKR's board? They and their PEU ilk are not done.
The Carlyle Group scares me more than anything I've ever seen on Wall Street. It seems to exist to corrupt politicians and it's hard to know who they even represent.
I watched a video interview of (David) Rubenstein and his arrogance is really beyond tolerance. He was going on about the debt ceiling problem and how there would need to be cuts in services and higher taxes. When the reporter asked him about tax on carried interest he turned really disdainful and said that this "only" amounted to $22 billion over some number of years and this was not serious money. Boy, nothing like everybody doing their small part to save the country from oblivion!