Michael Milken interviewed two asset managers, Blackstone CEO Jon Gray and Apollo CEO Marc Rowan. They talked about the varied menu of alternative investments each firm offers and their desire for individual retirement plans to load up on their specials.
They shared a slide showing how pervasive private equity underwriter (PEU) ownership became over the last two decades, which corresponded to America's widespread exporting of jobs. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin sent auto parts jobs to China while at The Carlyle Group. I'm sure he's not the only one given the large number of current elected officials that were once PEUs.
Half of U.S. large businesses are PEU backed. That means many Americans endured a private equity takeover and the subsequent cutting of people, squeezing of suppliers and other expense cuts in order to pay drastically higher interest expenses and get executives/sponsors the financial bonanza they craved.
Flashback to July 2011:
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.
DOGE triggered similar bad memories for many people. The fact that the richest man in the world was screwing federal workers just made the resonance more galling.
Trump II, the digital Caligula is not only at least fourteen years too late, he has the wrong culprits. U.S. employers exported American jobs. PEU owners outsourced work to China, Vietnam, and India while enjoying preferential tax treatment for their investment gains (highly unpopular, but still in effect today).
Hopefully the people who hate DOGE will get that same icky feeling when they see private equity or private credit options under their retirement plan. Remember how the greed and leverage boys crappified your workplace, jettisoned dedicated co-workers, milked the company for management fees and special dividends (debt funded) before leaving the company in a financially precarious position after their final profit-gasm.
Remember...
Update 5-8-25: A Fox News host stated on air:
“The real story of DOGE is that Elon Musk, who has $38 billion in government contracts, has not had a penny of his money touched while he’s going around cutting other people’s contracts,” she added.Tarlov pointed to a recent congressional report showing Musk could face $2.37 billion in potential fines across 11 agencies. Yet, she said, the people investigating those claims are the ones being laid off.“If that doesn’t smell like corruption, I don’t know what does,” she said.
U.S. trade negotiators are pushing other countries to use Musk's Starlink.
