Business Insider reported:
Thomas Jefferson once wrote to Congress that the US would try to drive Native Americans into debt to take their land. He suggested encouraging Indian Tribes to purchase goods on credit so they would go into debt.
"To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare & we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare & they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good & influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop th[em off] by a cession of lands," Jefferson wrote in his letter to Congress.
Credit Founding Father Thomas Jefferson for thinking like a private equity underwriter (PEU).
Founding PEU Jefferson had enough funds from the death of a good friend to free his slaves. He did not. Jefferson, the financial innovator, took out a loan using his slaves as collateral.
Leveraging assets, taking over companies via bankruptcy (usually prepackaged) are two common PEU strategies. Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein's and Thomas Jefferson are two peas from the same pod.
The Carlyle Group has taken over numerous companies (Bintons' and Mrs. Fields) via foreclosure/debt restructuring, the same strategy Jefferson suggested employing to get Native American land.
Rubenstein and his co-founders located Carlyle on Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from the White House. From the beginning Carlyle intended to manipulate political power and Uncle Sam's wallet into personal riches.
Rubenstein had multiple chances to not fight the proposed elimination of
private equity's preferred "carried interest" taxation, just as
Jefferson had years to access the estate intended to fund the freeing of
his slaves.
Patriotic philanthropist Rubenstein gave large sums to Jefferson's Monticello estate with its vibrant slave economy. Both Rubenstein and Jefferson clung to economic advantages
that enabled them to get richer and richer. Fairness and human equity did not matter.
