2012年2月28日星期二
Private Equity, Finance Lawyer Melinda Rishkofski Joins Baker Botts L.L.P. as Partner in Moscow
MOSCOW, February 28, 2012 /PRNewswire/ –
Melinda Rishkofski, who has represented private equity fund managers, international financial institutions and portfolio companies in Russia, Eastern Europe, the UK and the US, has joined Baker Botts L.L.P. as a partner in the firm´s Moscow office.
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120228/DA58239)
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20100503/BAKERBOTTSLOGO)
Rishkofski´s experience includes working with Russian and Eastern European privatization policies, policy advice and drafting laws for the new Russian economy, development of Russian corporate securities and regulatory structures. She also worked on regulatory and legislative matters with representatives for the U.S. and Russian governments.
“Melinda adds depth to our international transactional resources, ” said Baker Botts Managing Partner Walt Smith. “Her focus on the Russian market and her extensive private equity experience are significant additions to our client offerings.”
Prior to joining Baker Botts, Rishkofski was general counsel for Russian-based Baring Vostok Capital Partners. As principal advisor, negotiator and transaction counsel, she provided legal support to financial institutions, multilateral development banks, private equity fund managers and Russian companies with respect to debt and equity financing transactions, mergers and acquisitions, restructurings, employee incentive programs, dispute resolution and general corporate matters.
In this role, Rishkofski has worked with and served more than 35 investee companies and the legal needs of private equity investment funds with more than $2 billion in capital and assets. She has also worked extensively with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) on secured credit and debt and equity financing transactions.
“Melinda´s extensive knowledge of the private equity and funds sector in Russia and the CIS, a market sector where we expect to see significant increased activity in 2012, will provide our clients working in or entering into this sector an expertise not currently available from legal consultants in the region, ” said Steven Wardlaw, Partner in Charge of Baker Botts´ Moscow office.
Rishkofski obtained a BS from the Pennsylvania State University in the U.S., a J.D. from the Dickinson School of Law (now part of the Pennsylvania State University), and an LL.M in International Business and Finance from the University of London, Kings College in the UK.
About Baker Botts L.L.P.
Baker Botts is an international law firm with over 725 lawyers and a network of 13 offices around the globe. Based on our experience and knowledge of our clients´ industries, we are recognized as a leading firm in the energy, technology and life sciences sectors. Throughout our 172-year history, we have provided creative and effective legal solutions for our clients while demonstrating an unrelenting commitment to excellence. For more information, please visit http://www.bakerbotts.com/.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
2012年2月25日星期六
15. Investing in the right causes
Tandem Fund assists social enterprises in getting financing
TANDEM Fund calls itself a “patient investor” to social enterprises.
“For all their benefits, social enterprises find it difficult to obtain financing,” its website reads.
“On one hand, they generate returns that are too low for banks of traditional investors. On the other, they are often ineligible for foundation money as for-profit enterprises.
“Our role is to fill that gap. We act as a patient investor, providing capital to social enterprises that wouldn’t otherwise be able to gain investment.”
The venture fund, says its chief operating officer Kal Joffres, is the only one in Malaysia that invests exclusively in social enterprises.
As a not-for-profit fund, it differs from a conventional investment firm in that the returns from its investees are recycled into other social enterprises, rather than paid back as a dividend to shareholders.
A native Canadian, Joffres was a strategy consultant to non-profits and United Nations agencies prior to joining Tandem Fund.
The business and philosophy graduate from McGill University moved to Malaysia after helping a client here to start a social venture fund, which became Tandem Fund.
The fund has two sources of capital: the income from its subsidiary Tandemic, a social media consultancy, and a major banking group in Malaysia, who was the client that hired Joffres.
Tandemic – which has worked with consumer brands and government agencies – helps build social movements by organising communities around causes using social media and on-ground events.
“We started Tandemic because we thought some of our skills would be useful for companies and brands. The way we see it is a lot of organisations that are interested in social media aren’t doing it very well.
“They tell people, Here’s our latest deal, follow us on Twitter’, which is not effective. We try to engage people around causes they care about, we build communities around causes,” Joffres quips.
A portion of the Tandemic’s profit is used to finance Tandem Fund’s more experimental social enterprises.
On the second source, Joffres points out that the fund does not receive any cash for investment but rather acts as a conduit to identify social enterprises that meet several criteria, including financial sustainability and social impact. It is the bank that invests directly in the social enterprises, he says.
The social enterprises that are at a mature stage and can turn in a profit are put under Tandem Fund’s management, while the ones that more closely resemble a non-profit are directed to the bank’s philanthropic arm.
Tandem Fund has four projects under its belt: Design Change, Do Something Good, Sols24/7, and a yet unnamed mobile healthcare unit that aims to deliver medical care via waterways, especially in Sarawak.
Besides funding social enterprises, it helps streamline their operations, for example by customising a set of performance measures for each company.
On the challenges faced by fledgeling social enterprises, Joffres says this includes profitability, management skills, market access, and talent.
“A lot of social enterprises in Malaysia haven’t figured out how to make money yet. There’s still work to be done on the business model.
“They also tend to have very thin middle management. There are very passionate people running them, but it’s also important to have operational people in place to make sure things run smoothly,” he elaborates.
The country’s geography, he adds, can also be a hindrance as the people who need assistance are often deep in remote areas.
Disorganisation is another thing. “It’s easier to work with communities that are internally organised, but these are limited,” Joffres says.
“When you have one player that tries to do too many things along the value chain, instead of having a few to help you along the line, your risk increases. This is especially so if you are a start-up.”
In addition, he notes that there are talent acquisition issues in the sector, but insists that “just because you work for a social enterprise doesn’t mean you don’t get paid as well (as other companies)”. Some social enterprises do pay competitively, he says.
Nonetheless, he adds that “people love the fact they are working for social missions” in social enterprises.
“For the most part, it isn’t easy to get talent in any sector. We have a really passionate team and they get to pursue causes they’re interested in,” he says.
Joffres thinks that interest in the sector is growing among the youth and urbanites.
“If you have a strong social dimension you have an edge over companies that don’t,” he says.
“For instance, people don’t buy Body Shop products only because they’re good products, but also because of the social impact (they have). People who have spending power care about this stuff.”
Related Stories:
The rise of social enterprises
Creating an impact
SEA says some local enterprises are ready for investors
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
TANDEM Fund calls itself a “patient investor” to social enterprises.
“For all their benefits, social enterprises find it difficult to obtain financing,” its website reads.
“On one hand, they generate returns that are too low for banks of traditional investors. On the other, they are often ineligible for foundation money as for-profit enterprises.
“Our role is to fill that gap. We act as a patient investor, providing capital to social enterprises that wouldn’t otherwise be able to gain investment.”
The venture fund, says its chief operating officer Kal Joffres, is the only one in Malaysia that invests exclusively in social enterprises.
As a not-for-profit fund, it differs from a conventional investment firm in that the returns from its investees are recycled into other social enterprises, rather than paid back as a dividend to shareholders.
A native Canadian, Joffres was a strategy consultant to non-profits and United Nations agencies prior to joining Tandem Fund.
The business and philosophy graduate from McGill University moved to Malaysia after helping a client here to start a social venture fund, which became Tandem Fund.
The fund has two sources of capital: the income from its subsidiary Tandemic, a social media consultancy, and a major banking group in Malaysia, who was the client that hired Joffres.
Tandemic – which has worked with consumer brands and government agencies – helps build social movements by organising communities around causes using social media and on-ground events.
“We started Tandemic because we thought some of our skills would be useful for companies and brands. The way we see it is a lot of organisations that are interested in social media aren’t doing it very well.
“They tell people, Here’s our latest deal, follow us on Twitter’, which is not effective. We try to engage people around causes they care about, we build communities around causes,” Joffres quips.
A portion of the Tandemic’s profit is used to finance Tandem Fund’s more experimental social enterprises.
On the second source, Joffres points out that the fund does not receive any cash for investment but rather acts as a conduit to identify social enterprises that meet several criteria, including financial sustainability and social impact. It is the bank that invests directly in the social enterprises, he says.
The social enterprises that are at a mature stage and can turn in a profit are put under Tandem Fund’s management, while the ones that more closely resemble a non-profit are directed to the bank’s philanthropic arm.
Tandem Fund has four projects under its belt: Design Change, Do Something Good, Sols24/7, and a yet unnamed mobile healthcare unit that aims to deliver medical care via waterways, especially in Sarawak.
Besides funding social enterprises, it helps streamline their operations, for example by customising a set of performance measures for each company.
On the challenges faced by fledgeling social enterprises, Joffres says this includes profitability, management skills, market access, and talent.
“A lot of social enterprises in Malaysia haven’t figured out how to make money yet. There’s still work to be done on the business model.
“They also tend to have very thin middle management. There are very passionate people running them, but it’s also important to have operational people in place to make sure things run smoothly,” he elaborates.
The country’s geography, he adds, can also be a hindrance as the people who need assistance are often deep in remote areas.
Disorganisation is another thing. “It’s easier to work with communities that are internally organised, but these are limited,” Joffres says.
“When you have one player that tries to do too many things along the value chain, instead of having a few to help you along the line, your risk increases. This is especially so if you are a start-up.”
In addition, he notes that there are talent acquisition issues in the sector, but insists that “just because you work for a social enterprise doesn’t mean you don’t get paid as well (as other companies)”. Some social enterprises do pay competitively, he says.
Nonetheless, he adds that “people love the fact they are working for social missions” in social enterprises.
“For the most part, it isn’t easy to get talent in any sector. We have a really passionate team and they get to pursue causes they’re interested in,” he says.
Joffres thinks that interest in the sector is growing among the youth and urbanites.
“If you have a strong social dimension you have an edge over companies that don’t,” he says.
“For instance, people don’t buy Body Shop products only because they’re good products, but also because of the social impact (they have). People who have spending power care about this stuff.”
Related Stories:
The rise of social enterprises
Creating an impact
SEA says some local enterprises are ready for investors
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
2012年2月24日星期五
Social Entertainment Leader Milyoni Secures $11 Million in Funding
PLEASANTON, CA–(Marketwire -02/24/12)- Milyoni, the leader in social entertainment, today announced that it has secured $11 million in Series B financing led by Oak Investment Partners. Previous investors ATA Ventures and Thomvest Ventures also participated in the round. Milyoni will use the funding to further extend its product portfolio in bringing social entertainment experiences to fans on Facebook. The company will also expand its U.S. presence, with offices opening in Los Angeles and New York City.
“With more than 800 million users and growing, Facebook has established itself as a go-to platform for the discovery and consumption of content today,” said John Corpus, founder and CEO. “In 2012, we anticipate an even greater shift in behavior, with more entertainment companies putting the marketing muscle behind their Facebook presence to further expand their selections of movies, music and other content on the platform. The way we see it, we’re only in the first of a nine inning game.”
Milyoni provides a new way for entertainment companies to take their Facebook presence to the next level by providing a fun, unique, shared and social experience to users. Using Social Cinema and Social Live, fans can easily view, like and comment during particular points within a movie, TV show, sporting event or concert and chat with friends while watching. Over the last year, Milyoni has powered some of the biggest social entertainment campaigns on Facebook and has stamped a number of innovative firsts, including the first PPV movie on Facebook, the first live PPV concert on Facebook, the first socially interactive movie and the first day-and-date movie release on Facebook.
“Oak Investment Partners is excited to join the Milyoni team to further extend their stronghold in the social entertainment arena,” said Fred Harman, Managing Partner at Oak Investment Partners. “The company has shown tremendous traction and growth over the last year, hosting more than 100 titles on Facebook today. The audience for Milyoni’s technology continues to expand along with Facebook’s growth. We’re confident that the Milyoni team has both the passion and experience to propel the company forward.”
“We’ve believed in Milyoni from the beginning and have seen the company’s growth mirror that of the entertainment industry’s needs,” said Hatch Graham, Managing Director, ATA Ventures. “Milyoni’s technology has evolved into the powerhouse social entertainment platform it is today, and the company is poised to continue its leadership in the space. ATA Ventures is thrilled to be a supporting partner.”
Milyoni is primed for an impressive 2012 with 15 current studio partnerships and dozens more in the pipeline. The company has more than 3,000 Social Cinema titles and over 50 Social Live events slated by year’s end. Milyoni will continue to enrich studio interaction, administration and analytics functionality bringing unprecedented insight and engagement to the entertainment experience.
For more information, visit http://www.milyoni.com.
About MilyoniBased in the San Francisco Bay Area, Milyoni, Inc. is the leader in social entertainment. The company’s technology provides entertainment companies with a way to connect and engage with Facebook fans, and turn them into customers. Whether it’s watching a live concert, movie or sporting event or shopping your favorite brands, Milyoni enables companies to monetize fans pages through a unique level of engagement and a shared, social experience. Milyoni’s services reach over 150 million fans from industry leading customers, including Universal Pictures, Lionsgate, Paramount Studios, Big Air Studios, Austin City Limits Live, Turner Broadcasting, University of Oklahoma and The NBA to bring a variety of digital content and physical goods to fans on Facebook. For more information, visit www.milyoni.com.
About Oak Investment PartnersOak Investment Partners is a multistage venture capital firm and a lead investor in the next generation of enduring growth companies. Since 1978 the firm has invested $9 billion in nearly 500 companies around the world, earning the trust of entrepreneurs with a senior team that delivers steady guidance, deep domain expertise and a consistent investment philosophy. Its current portfolio includes Bleacher Report, Demand Media, Federated Media, Good Technology, KAYAK Software, MobiTV, Rearden Commerce, and Wonga. Oak Investment Partners is also known for its historical investments in aQuantive, Allyes, AthenaHealth, Gmarket, HuffingtonPost, Inktomi, Netspend, Polycom, Seagate, and TeleAtlas.
About ATA VenturesATA Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on seeking out early stage private companies that appear to offer above average prospects for capital growth. With over $450 Million of capital under management, ATA Ventures focuses on Information Technology (IT) and provides seed capital and early stages of financing to these companies. For more information, visit http://ataventures.com.
About Thomvest VenturesThomvest Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm committed to the success of our entrepreneur partners. We primarily focus on investments in areas where we have deep expertise and experience, including software, technology-enabled services, and hardware businesses. The capital we invest is our own, enabling us to be more creative, flexible and patient than many venture investors. More than two-thirds of the companies we have funded in the last decade have either gone public, been acquired, or continue to grow as independent businesses. For more information, visit www.thomvest.com.
Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
“With more than 800 million users and growing, Facebook has established itself as a go-to platform for the discovery and consumption of content today,” said John Corpus, founder and CEO. “In 2012, we anticipate an even greater shift in behavior, with more entertainment companies putting the marketing muscle behind their Facebook presence to further expand their selections of movies, music and other content on the platform. The way we see it, we’re only in the first of a nine inning game.”
Milyoni provides a new way for entertainment companies to take their Facebook presence to the next level by providing a fun, unique, shared and social experience to users. Using Social Cinema and Social Live, fans can easily view, like and comment during particular points within a movie, TV show, sporting event or concert and chat with friends while watching. Over the last year, Milyoni has powered some of the biggest social entertainment campaigns on Facebook and has stamped a number of innovative firsts, including the first PPV movie on Facebook, the first live PPV concert on Facebook, the first socially interactive movie and the first day-and-date movie release on Facebook.
“Oak Investment Partners is excited to join the Milyoni team to further extend their stronghold in the social entertainment arena,” said Fred Harman, Managing Partner at Oak Investment Partners. “The company has shown tremendous traction and growth over the last year, hosting more than 100 titles on Facebook today. The audience for Milyoni’s technology continues to expand along with Facebook’s growth. We’re confident that the Milyoni team has both the passion and experience to propel the company forward.”
“We’ve believed in Milyoni from the beginning and have seen the company’s growth mirror that of the entertainment industry’s needs,” said Hatch Graham, Managing Director, ATA Ventures. “Milyoni’s technology has evolved into the powerhouse social entertainment platform it is today, and the company is poised to continue its leadership in the space. ATA Ventures is thrilled to be a supporting partner.”
Milyoni is primed for an impressive 2012 with 15 current studio partnerships and dozens more in the pipeline. The company has more than 3,000 Social Cinema titles and over 50 Social Live events slated by year’s end. Milyoni will continue to enrich studio interaction, administration and analytics functionality bringing unprecedented insight and engagement to the entertainment experience.
For more information, visit http://www.milyoni.com.
About MilyoniBased in the San Francisco Bay Area, Milyoni, Inc. is the leader in social entertainment. The company’s technology provides entertainment companies with a way to connect and engage with Facebook fans, and turn them into customers. Whether it’s watching a live concert, movie or sporting event or shopping your favorite brands, Milyoni enables companies to monetize fans pages through a unique level of engagement and a shared, social experience. Milyoni’s services reach over 150 million fans from industry leading customers, including Universal Pictures, Lionsgate, Paramount Studios, Big Air Studios, Austin City Limits Live, Turner Broadcasting, University of Oklahoma and The NBA to bring a variety of digital content and physical goods to fans on Facebook. For more information, visit www.milyoni.com.
About Oak Investment PartnersOak Investment Partners is a multistage venture capital firm and a lead investor in the next generation of enduring growth companies. Since 1978 the firm has invested $9 billion in nearly 500 companies around the world, earning the trust of entrepreneurs with a senior team that delivers steady guidance, deep domain expertise and a consistent investment philosophy. Its current portfolio includes Bleacher Report, Demand Media, Federated Media, Good Technology, KAYAK Software, MobiTV, Rearden Commerce, and Wonga. Oak Investment Partners is also known for its historical investments in aQuantive, Allyes, AthenaHealth, Gmarket, HuffingtonPost, Inktomi, Netspend, Polycom, Seagate, and TeleAtlas.
About ATA VenturesATA Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on seeking out early stage private companies that appear to offer above average prospects for capital growth. With over $450 Million of capital under management, ATA Ventures focuses on Information Technology (IT) and provides seed capital and early stages of financing to these companies. For more information, visit http://ataventures.com.
About Thomvest VenturesThomvest Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm committed to the success of our entrepreneur partners. We primarily focus on investments in areas where we have deep expertise and experience, including software, technology-enabled services, and hardware businesses. The capital we invest is our own, enabling us to be more creative, flexible and patient than many venture investors. More than two-thirds of the companies we have funded in the last decade have either gone public, been acquired, or continue to grow as independent businesses. For more information, visit www.thomvest.com.
Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
Social Entertainment Leader Milyoni Secures $11 Million in Funding
PLEASANTON, CA–(Marketwire -02/24/12)- Milyoni, the leader in social entertainment, today announced that it has secured $11 million in Series B financing led by Oak Investment Partners. Previous investors ATA Ventures and Thomvest Ventures also participated in the round. Milyoni will use the funding to further extend its product portfolio in bringing social entertainment experiences to fans on Facebook. The company will also expand its U.S. presence, with offices opening in Los Angeles and New York City.
“With more than 800 million users and growing, Facebook has established itself as a go-to platform for the discovery and consumption of content today,” said John Corpus, founder and CEO. “In 2012, we anticipate an even greater shift in behavior, with more entertainment companies putting the marketing muscle behind their Facebook presence to further expand their selections of movies, music and other content on the platform. The way we see it, we’re only in the first of a nine inning game.”
Milyoni provides a new way for entertainment companies to take their Facebook presence to the next level by providing a fun, unique, shared and social experience to users. Using Social Cinema and Social Live, fans can easily view, like and comment during particular points within a movie, TV show, sporting event or concert and chat with friends while watching. Over the last year, Milyoni has powered some of the biggest social entertainment campaigns on Facebook and has stamped a number of innovative firsts, including the first PPV movie on Facebook, the first live PPV concert on Facebook, the first socially interactive movie and the first day-and-date movie release on Facebook.
“Oak Investment Partners is excited to join the Milyoni team to further extend their stronghold in the social entertainment arena,” said Fred Harman, Managing Partner at Oak Investment Partners. “The company has shown tremendous traction and growth over the last year, hosting more than 100 titles on Facebook today. The audience for Milyoni’s technology continues to expand along with Facebook’s growth. We’re confident that the Milyoni team has both the passion and experience to propel the company forward.”
“We’ve believed in Milyoni from the beginning and have seen the company’s growth mirror that of the entertainment industry’s needs,” said Hatch Graham, Managing Director, ATA Ventures. “Milyoni’s technology has evolved into the powerhouse social entertainment platform it is today, and the company is poised to continue its leadership in the space. ATA Ventures is thrilled to be a supporting partner.”
Milyoni is primed for an impressive 2012 with 15 current studio partnerships and dozens more in the pipeline. The company has more than 3,000 Social Cinema titles and over 50 Social Live events slated by year’s end. Milyoni will continue to enrich studio interaction, administration and analytics functionality bringing unprecedented insight and engagement to the entertainment experience.
For more information, visit http://www.milyoni.com.
About MilyoniBased in the San Francisco Bay Area, Milyoni, Inc. is the leader in social entertainment. The company’s technology provides entertainment companies with a way to connect and engage with Facebook fans, and turn them into customers. Whether it’s watching a live concert, movie or sporting event or shopping your favorite brands, Milyoni enables companies to monetize fans pages through a unique level of engagement and a shared, social experience. Milyoni’s services reach over 150 million fans from industry leading customers, including Universal Pictures, Lionsgate, Paramount Studios, Big Air Studios, Austin City Limits Live, Turner Broadcasting, University of Oklahoma and The NBA to bring a variety of digital content and physical goods to fans on Facebook. For more information, visit www.milyoni.com.
About Oak Investment PartnersOak Investment Partners is a multistage venture capital firm and a lead investor in the next generation of enduring growth companies. Since 1978 the firm has invested $9 billion in nearly 500 companies around the world, earning the trust of entrepreneurs with a senior team that delivers steady guidance, deep domain expertise and a consistent investment philosophy. Its current portfolio includes Bleacher Report, Demand Media, Federated Media, Good Technology, KAYAK Software, MobiTV, Rearden Commerce, and Wonga. Oak Investment Partners is also known for its historical investments in aQuantive, Allyes, AthenaHealth, Gmarket, HuffingtonPost, Inktomi, Netspend, Polycom, Seagate, and TeleAtlas.
About ATA VenturesATA Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on seeking out early stage private companies that appear to offer above average prospects for capital growth. With over $450 Million of capital under management, ATA Ventures focuses on Information Technology (IT) and provides seed capital and early stages of financing to these companies. For more information, visit http://ataventures.com.
About Thomvest VenturesThomvest Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm committed to the success of our entrepreneur partners. We primarily focus on investments in areas where we have deep expertise and experience, including software, technology-enabled services, and hardware businesses. The capital we invest is our own, enabling us to be more creative, flexible and patient than many venture investors. More than two-thirds of the companies we have funded in the last decade have either gone public, been acquired, or continue to grow as independent businesses. For more information, visit www.thomvest.com.
Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
“With more than 800 million users and growing, Facebook has established itself as a go-to platform for the discovery and consumption of content today,” said John Corpus, founder and CEO. “In 2012, we anticipate an even greater shift in behavior, with more entertainment companies putting the marketing muscle behind their Facebook presence to further expand their selections of movies, music and other content on the platform. The way we see it, we’re only in the first of a nine inning game.”
Milyoni provides a new way for entertainment companies to take their Facebook presence to the next level by providing a fun, unique, shared and social experience to users. Using Social Cinema and Social Live, fans can easily view, like and comment during particular points within a movie, TV show, sporting event or concert and chat with friends while watching. Over the last year, Milyoni has powered some of the biggest social entertainment campaigns on Facebook and has stamped a number of innovative firsts, including the first PPV movie on Facebook, the first live PPV concert on Facebook, the first socially interactive movie and the first day-and-date movie release on Facebook.
“Oak Investment Partners is excited to join the Milyoni team to further extend their stronghold in the social entertainment arena,” said Fred Harman, Managing Partner at Oak Investment Partners. “The company has shown tremendous traction and growth over the last year, hosting more than 100 titles on Facebook today. The audience for Milyoni’s technology continues to expand along with Facebook’s growth. We’re confident that the Milyoni team has both the passion and experience to propel the company forward.”
“We’ve believed in Milyoni from the beginning and have seen the company’s growth mirror that of the entertainment industry’s needs,” said Hatch Graham, Managing Director, ATA Ventures. “Milyoni’s technology has evolved into the powerhouse social entertainment platform it is today, and the company is poised to continue its leadership in the space. ATA Ventures is thrilled to be a supporting partner.”
Milyoni is primed for an impressive 2012 with 15 current studio partnerships and dozens more in the pipeline. The company has more than 3,000 Social Cinema titles and over 50 Social Live events slated by year’s end. Milyoni will continue to enrich studio interaction, administration and analytics functionality bringing unprecedented insight and engagement to the entertainment experience.
For more information, visit http://www.milyoni.com.
About MilyoniBased in the San Francisco Bay Area, Milyoni, Inc. is the leader in social entertainment. The company’s technology provides entertainment companies with a way to connect and engage with Facebook fans, and turn them into customers. Whether it’s watching a live concert, movie or sporting event or shopping your favorite brands, Milyoni enables companies to monetize fans pages through a unique level of engagement and a shared, social experience. Milyoni’s services reach over 150 million fans from industry leading customers, including Universal Pictures, Lionsgate, Paramount Studios, Big Air Studios, Austin City Limits Live, Turner Broadcasting, University of Oklahoma and The NBA to bring a variety of digital content and physical goods to fans on Facebook. For more information, visit www.milyoni.com.
About Oak Investment PartnersOak Investment Partners is a multistage venture capital firm and a lead investor in the next generation of enduring growth companies. Since 1978 the firm has invested $9 billion in nearly 500 companies around the world, earning the trust of entrepreneurs with a senior team that delivers steady guidance, deep domain expertise and a consistent investment philosophy. Its current portfolio includes Bleacher Report, Demand Media, Federated Media, Good Technology, KAYAK Software, MobiTV, Rearden Commerce, and Wonga. Oak Investment Partners is also known for its historical investments in aQuantive, Allyes, AthenaHealth, Gmarket, HuffingtonPost, Inktomi, Netspend, Polycom, Seagate, and TeleAtlas.
About ATA VenturesATA Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on seeking out early stage private companies that appear to offer above average prospects for capital growth. With over $450 Million of capital under management, ATA Ventures focuses on Information Technology (IT) and provides seed capital and early stages of financing to these companies. For more information, visit http://ataventures.com.
About Thomvest VenturesThomvest Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm committed to the success of our entrepreneur partners. We primarily focus on investments in areas where we have deep expertise and experience, including software, technology-enabled services, and hardware businesses. The capital we invest is our own, enabling us to be more creative, flexible and patient than many venture investors. More than two-thirds of the companies we have funded in the last decade have either gone public, been acquired, or continue to grow as independent businesses. For more information, visit www.thomvest.com.
Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
2012年2月23日星期四
State Pensions Find Private Equity Bites as Blackstone Cuts Jobs
February 23, 2012, 12:58 AM EST
By William Selway and Martin Z. Braun
Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) — Shirley Kimber walked off the production line from her $17.56-an-hour job at a Birds Eye Foods plant in Fulton, New York, for the last time in November.
The new owners, Pinnacle Foods Group LLC, a company held by the private equity firm Blackstone Group LP, closed the factory and fired 270 workers. Kimber, 64, got eight weeks severance for her 12 years on the job and lives with her 37-year-old unemployed daughter in the rust-belt town of about 12,000, northwest of Syracuse.
“They just used us. That’s exactly what they did,” Kimber said. “And then they kicked us to the curb.”
While the closing killed union jobs, it may also help protect the retirement benefits that organized labor bargained for on behalf of public employees.
In addition to Blackstone, the world’s largest buyout firm, New York State’s two public employee pensions and four New York City pensions stand to gain from the drive for higher profits at Pinnacle foods. The retirement funds poured $920 million into the $20 billion Blackstone fund that owns Pinnacle, which took over Birds Eye in 2009.
Public pension funds — seeking to boost returns after failing to secure the 8 percent annual investment earnings needed to pay benefits for teachers, police officers and other civil servants — are the biggest source of cash for private equity firms.
Faster Pace
Companies owned by New York-based Blackstone added jobs at a faster pace than the U.S. economy for the past two years, said Peter Rose, a spokesman for the firm. Private equity’s investment returns “are one of the few ways that pension funds can help keep the promises that they have made to their retirees,” he said.
Pinnacle Foods closed the Fulton plant to cut transportation costs by moving operations closer to suppliers, said Michelle Weese, a spokeswoman for the company.
While firms such as Blackstone and Bain Capital LLC, co- founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have drawn scrutiny for their paring of jobs and the low tax rates enjoyed by executives, the role of taxpayer money in financing their acquisitions has received less notice.
By September 2011, public pensions with at least $1 billion in assets had an average of 11 percent of their money in private equity, more than triple their investments a decade earlier, according to Wilshire Associates, a Santa Monica, California- based consulting firm.
Rising Investment
Such funds have about $400 billion with private equity, 29 percent of the total, according to Prequin Ltd., a London-based private equity research firm. That’s more than twice what was put in by private pension funds, the next biggest investor.
Public pensions “have been the investors that have really fueled private equity’s rise,” said Steven Davidoff, a professor of law and finance at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law in Columbus, Ohio. “For those people who complain about private equity, the money is really coming from pension funds.”
Private equity firms buy companies and seek to trim costs, improve operations, boost profits and resell them. The takeovers are typically financed by debt taken on by the purchased companies.
The business has been drawn into the presidential contest as Romney parried attacks from Republican rivals who suggested he built a fortune of as much as $250 million with takeovers that cost workers their jobs. He has disputed this characterization.
Private equity executives, including Blackstone managing director and Pinnacle Foods director Prakash Melwani, have helped stock Romney’s campaign war chests. Melwani declined to comment.
Mayor Objects
Fulton Mayor Ronald Woodward, a Republican, said the Birds Eye takeover has devastated his town, adding that he is troubled to learn that New York pension money helped finance the acquisition.
“Isn’t that a slap in the face to the people in Fulton that are losing their jobs and paying the salaries of those union workers and they’re using their investments there,” Woodward said. “It’s like biting the hand that feeds you.”
Her severance exhausted, Kimber now lives off unemployment benefits of $1,620 a month, plus $100 a month in pension payments, she said. She pays 22 percent of that for health insurance. Her daughter, also named Shirley, has a biology degree but can’t find a job using that specialty. To make a few extra dollars, she babysits and sells books online.
Executive Compensation
Robert Gamgort is chief executive officer of Parsippany, New Jersey-based Pinnacle Foods, which also makes Dunkin Hines cake mix, Vlasic Pickles and Hungry Man frozen dinners.
Gamgort was awarded compensation valued at $5.5 million in 2010 and $11.6 million in 2009. Sara Genster Robling, head of the Birds Eye division, got pay packages worth $1.5 million in 2010 and $2.1 million the previous year. Most of the pay was in company stock. Gamgort and Robling weren’t available for comment, she said.
After the collapse of 1990s Internet bubble left pensions reeling from investment losses, state and local government funds poured money into private equity firms. The financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession left U.S. state public pensions $694.2 billion short of having enough assets to pay future benefits by the end of their 2010 budget years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Higher Returns
Private equity deals promised higher returns than stocks and bonds. The 15-year median return on stocks for public pension funds with more than $1 billion assets, before fees, is 5.5 percent annualized as of Dec. 31, 2011, while the median return for private equity in that time period is 9.8 percent, according to the Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service.
The deals have served pensions well. New York state’s teachers pension’s private equity investments delivered an annual rate of return of 11.8 percent as of June 30, 2011. New York City’s private equity investments in four of its five pension funds have returns ranging from 9.2 percent to 11.1 percent.
That helps save taxpayers money. For workers and the acquired companies, the benefits can be harder to discern.
A study led by the University of Chicago’s Steven Davis, based on 3,200 private equity deals from 1980 to 2005 and published in September, sought to quantify the impact. It found that employment at acquired companies dropped 6 percent in the next five years relative to stand-alone peers as they shuttered lagging businesses.
‘Creative Destruction’
Still, the companies also added workers by opening new business lines and through acquisitions. The study concluded that such deals accelerated the “creative destruction” of jobs, with a “modest” impact on total payrolls.
“Private equity investors are remorseless in their perspective on business,” said Robert Bruner, the dean of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. “That is a manifestation of the rigors of the capitalist system,” he said. “It accelerates the process.”
Rose Pitcher, 50, experienced that first-hand. After working 25 years at the Birds Eye plant in Fulton, she wrapped up her last shift in November, with eight weeks severance, as Pinnacle moved the plant’s jobs to Wisconsin and Minnesota. Other employers in the area, like an apple-packing plant in Oswego, pay less than half the $17 an hour she was making overseeing the machine sealing packages of Voila! ready-made meals at Birds Eye.
“There just doesn’t seem to be anything out there,” she said.
Portfolio Companies
Blackstone says it has a record of boosting employment overall. In 2011, Blackstone’s portfolio companies added 4.6 percent to their payrolls by creating new jobs, rather than through acquisitions, and increased them 3 percent in 2010, said Rose, the company spokesman. That outpaced job growth in the economy, he said.
“Private equity is a vital source of capital to grow and strengthen companies where public capital cannot or is unwilling to invest,” said Rose.
New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, the sole trustee of New York’s $140 billion retirement fund, declined to comment. New York City Comptroller John Liu declined to comment. John Cardillo, a spokesman for New York state’s Teachers’ Retirement System, declined to comment.
Drivers coming into Fulton are greeted by the red-brick Nestle chocolate factory, where for 103 years the company made condensed milk, semi-sweet morsels and Crunch Bars. It shut down in 2003.
The Nestle factory employed 1,500 people at its height. In 1994, Miller Brewing also shut down a plant just outside of town, putting 900 people out of work.
Taking Down Signs
A couple of years after Miller shut its operations, city officials took down signs on Routes 481, 48 and 3, the thoroughfares entering Fulton, that read: “City with a Future.”
It’s a far cry from the 1930s, when the New York Sun wrote a story about Fulton entitled “The Mystery of Fulton, N.Y., the City the Depression Missed.” Then, factories powered by electricity generated by the Oswego River, which bisects the town, churned out knives, textiles and shotguns. The Fort Stanwix Canning Co. opened a plant in Fulton in 1902. In 1938 it began packaging Birds Eye vegetables.
Two Decades
The Birds Eye plant had survived during the past two decades as it passed from General Foods Corp. to Philip Morris Cos. to Dean Foods Inc. In 1998, Dean Foods sold it to Agrilink Foods Inc. for $400 million. In 2002, Agrilink sold a majority stake in the company for $175 million to Vestar Capital Partners, a private equity firm where Melwani was a managing director. Melwani is now at Blackstone.
Vestar transformed the company. In 2006, it shifted focus to brand-named foods and developing new product lines. It announced that it would jettison most of its non-brand frozen food businesses, affecting five facilities, including three in western New York, that employed about 740. In 2007, Birds Eye borrowed money to pay Vestar and Agrilink a one-time $298.2 million dividend, according to corporate filings.
Vestar turned Birds Eye into a smaller, profitable company. By 2009, Birds Eye earned $54 million on sales of $936 million, compared with a $131 million loss and sales of $1 billion in 2002. Its workforce had shrunk to 1,700 from 4,000, filings show.
In November 2009, Pinnacle Foods, owned by Blackstone, agreed to buy Birds Eye for $1.3 billion. The purchase was financed by $1.15 billion of debt. Blackstone contributed $260 million in equity. Carol Makovich, a Vestar spokeswoman, declined to comment.
$17 Million
Blackstone affiliates were paid $17 million in acquisition fees for arranging the Birds Eye deal. Pinnacle has also paid Blackstone at least $15.5 million in management fees since it was taken over by the firm in 2007, according to company filings.
Under Blackstone, Birds Eye’s sales and profits have risen. In the quarter that ended in September, sales were $248 million, an 11.2 percent increase from the year earlier. The growth was driven by expanded distribution and demand for new products, in addition to lower new product distribution expenses, the company said in a filing.
Charles Murphy, 66, had worked at the Birds Eye plant in Fulton through a series of owners for 22 years before retiring at the end of 2010. He said employees were optimistic that the factory would survive.
Schumer Press Conference
In January 2010, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, held a press conference with workers in Fulton, saying he would keep pressuring the company until all the jobs were safe. Schumer said he called Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone’s chairman and co-founder, and asked him to spare the factory.
“No one expected that place to close,” said Murphy.
Then Pinnacle started cutting jobs. In mid-2010, it began closing down the Rochester, New York headquarters where 200 worked. That December it announced the closure of a Tacoma, Washington, plant that employed 160 and would shift production to Iowa.
On April 13, 2011, a Wednesday, employees coming to work at the Fulton plant saw a makeshift sign taped to a window: A mandatory meeting for all employees would be held at the Fulton War Memorial, the town’s exhibition hall and gymnasium on the 15th.
A Birds Eye lawyer told those gathered that the company would close the Fulton plant and move some of the jobs to Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Paul Robinson, a 59 year-old who ran packing machines remembered asking managers, “What can we do to keep the plant open?”
‘Minds Made Up’
Nothing, he said Pinnacle managers replied. “They had their minds made up.”
Wisconsin had offered Pinnacle $1.3 million in incentives to shift production to the state. Worker’s compensation costs were also lower — an average of $1,100 per employee in Wisconsin compared with $12,000 in New York, Mayor Woodward said.
While new jobs were added elsewhere, the closures cut the Birds Eye’s payroll by about 300, or 17 percent, as it eliminated more jobs than were added elsewhere, according to Weese, the Pinnacle spokeswoman. She said such costs are common after corporate mergers.
“Synergies are true with every deal. It’s not unique to this particular deal,” Weese said. “It’s less expensive to run one company than two.”
Not all public pensions have stood by as a private equity firms managing their money announced job cuts.
Hugo Boss
In 2010, after hearing that clothing-company Hugo Boss AG was planning to close a factory in a Cleveland suburb where it manufactured suits, threatening the jobs of 300 workers, Ohio’s public employee pension fund contacted Hugo Boss’s owner, London-based private equity firm Permira Advisers LLP.
Ohio’s Public Employees Retirement System had invested $80 million in the Permira fund that owned Hugo Boss. After writing to Permira and not getting a response, the pension fund followed up with another letter saying it would “think long and hard” about investing any more money with Permira, said Hugh Quill, a former Ohio pension trustees. The plant was never closed.
“These guys could have cared less about a plant in Cleveland, Ohio, but they did care about not having institutional investors for their next $500 million offering,” Quill said. “I think it was the right thing to do, given the amount of pain and suffering that was going on in the state.”
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System and public pensions from Maryland and Pennsylvania, which invested in Permira, also lobbied the firm. So did New York City’s pension funds.
Liu’s Letter
“New York’s pension funds do not wish to be investing in job loss or in a global ‘race to the bottom,’” New York City Comptroller Liu wrote in a letter to Permira.
Chris Davison, director of communications for Permira, declined to comment.
In Fulton, Charles Murphy’s wife, Donna, had been out on medical leave since October 2010 when the Birds Eye closure was announced. Still struggling with lung cancer, she lost her job when she couldn’t return to work for the factory’s last two months. That meant she didn’t get any severance pay. She worked there for 25 years.
Pinnacle’s Weese said details about medical leave and severance pay were worked out in negotiations with the employees’ union, Workers United Local 1822.
‘Devoting Your Life’
“You spend that many years devoting your life to the company, coming in to work every day, and they think nothing of you,” said Murphy, who lives in nearby Oswego. “This hurt a lot of people’s livelihoods.”
Fulton mayor Woodward, who was a maintenance supervisor with Nestle when the plant shut in 2003, said his story is another sign of the times.
“What you’re doing by doing that — you are systematically eliminating the middle class,” he said. “You’re going to be rich or you’re going to be poor. There’s no in between.”
–Editors: Jeffrey Taylor, Larry Edelman
To contact the reporters on this story: William Selway in Washington at wselway@bloomberg.net; Martin Braun in New York at mbraun6@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeffrey Taylor at Jtaylor48@bloomberg.net
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By William Selway and Martin Z. Braun
Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) — Shirley Kimber walked off the production line from her $17.56-an-hour job at a Birds Eye Foods plant in Fulton, New York, for the last time in November.
The new owners, Pinnacle Foods Group LLC, a company held by the private equity firm Blackstone Group LP, closed the factory and fired 270 workers. Kimber, 64, got eight weeks severance for her 12 years on the job and lives with her 37-year-old unemployed daughter in the rust-belt town of about 12,000, northwest of Syracuse.
“They just used us. That’s exactly what they did,” Kimber said. “And then they kicked us to the curb.”
While the closing killed union jobs, it may also help protect the retirement benefits that organized labor bargained for on behalf of public employees.
In addition to Blackstone, the world’s largest buyout firm, New York State’s two public employee pensions and four New York City pensions stand to gain from the drive for higher profits at Pinnacle foods. The retirement funds poured $920 million into the $20 billion Blackstone fund that owns Pinnacle, which took over Birds Eye in 2009.
Public pension funds — seeking to boost returns after failing to secure the 8 percent annual investment earnings needed to pay benefits for teachers, police officers and other civil servants — are the biggest source of cash for private equity firms.
Faster Pace
Companies owned by New York-based Blackstone added jobs at a faster pace than the U.S. economy for the past two years, said Peter Rose, a spokesman for the firm. Private equity’s investment returns “are one of the few ways that pension funds can help keep the promises that they have made to their retirees,” he said.
Pinnacle Foods closed the Fulton plant to cut transportation costs by moving operations closer to suppliers, said Michelle Weese, a spokeswoman for the company.
While firms such as Blackstone and Bain Capital LLC, co- founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have drawn scrutiny for their paring of jobs and the low tax rates enjoyed by executives, the role of taxpayer money in financing their acquisitions has received less notice.
By September 2011, public pensions with at least $1 billion in assets had an average of 11 percent of their money in private equity, more than triple their investments a decade earlier, according to Wilshire Associates, a Santa Monica, California- based consulting firm.
Rising Investment
Such funds have about $400 billion with private equity, 29 percent of the total, according to Prequin Ltd., a London-based private equity research firm. That’s more than twice what was put in by private pension funds, the next biggest investor.
Public pensions “have been the investors that have really fueled private equity’s rise,” said Steven Davidoff, a professor of law and finance at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law in Columbus, Ohio. “For those people who complain about private equity, the money is really coming from pension funds.”
Private equity firms buy companies and seek to trim costs, improve operations, boost profits and resell them. The takeovers are typically financed by debt taken on by the purchased companies.
The business has been drawn into the presidential contest as Romney parried attacks from Republican rivals who suggested he built a fortune of as much as $250 million with takeovers that cost workers their jobs. He has disputed this characterization.
Private equity executives, including Blackstone managing director and Pinnacle Foods director Prakash Melwani, have helped stock Romney’s campaign war chests. Melwani declined to comment.
Mayor Objects
Fulton Mayor Ronald Woodward, a Republican, said the Birds Eye takeover has devastated his town, adding that he is troubled to learn that New York pension money helped finance the acquisition.
“Isn’t that a slap in the face to the people in Fulton that are losing their jobs and paying the salaries of those union workers and they’re using their investments there,” Woodward said. “It’s like biting the hand that feeds you.”
Her severance exhausted, Kimber now lives off unemployment benefits of $1,620 a month, plus $100 a month in pension payments, she said. She pays 22 percent of that for health insurance. Her daughter, also named Shirley, has a biology degree but can’t find a job using that specialty. To make a few extra dollars, she babysits and sells books online.
Executive Compensation
Robert Gamgort is chief executive officer of Parsippany, New Jersey-based Pinnacle Foods, which also makes Dunkin Hines cake mix, Vlasic Pickles and Hungry Man frozen dinners.
Gamgort was awarded compensation valued at $5.5 million in 2010 and $11.6 million in 2009. Sara Genster Robling, head of the Birds Eye division, got pay packages worth $1.5 million in 2010 and $2.1 million the previous year. Most of the pay was in company stock. Gamgort and Robling weren’t available for comment, she said.
After the collapse of 1990s Internet bubble left pensions reeling from investment losses, state and local government funds poured money into private equity firms. The financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession left U.S. state public pensions $694.2 billion short of having enough assets to pay future benefits by the end of their 2010 budget years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Higher Returns
Private equity deals promised higher returns than stocks and bonds. The 15-year median return on stocks for public pension funds with more than $1 billion assets, before fees, is 5.5 percent annualized as of Dec. 31, 2011, while the median return for private equity in that time period is 9.8 percent, according to the Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service.
The deals have served pensions well. New York state’s teachers pension’s private equity investments delivered an annual rate of return of 11.8 percent as of June 30, 2011. New York City’s private equity investments in four of its five pension funds have returns ranging from 9.2 percent to 11.1 percent.
That helps save taxpayers money. For workers and the acquired companies, the benefits can be harder to discern.
A study led by the University of Chicago’s Steven Davis, based on 3,200 private equity deals from 1980 to 2005 and published in September, sought to quantify the impact. It found that employment at acquired companies dropped 6 percent in the next five years relative to stand-alone peers as they shuttered lagging businesses.
‘Creative Destruction’
Still, the companies also added workers by opening new business lines and through acquisitions. The study concluded that such deals accelerated the “creative destruction” of jobs, with a “modest” impact on total payrolls.
“Private equity investors are remorseless in their perspective on business,” said Robert Bruner, the dean of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. “That is a manifestation of the rigors of the capitalist system,” he said. “It accelerates the process.”
Rose Pitcher, 50, experienced that first-hand. After working 25 years at the Birds Eye plant in Fulton, she wrapped up her last shift in November, with eight weeks severance, as Pinnacle moved the plant’s jobs to Wisconsin and Minnesota. Other employers in the area, like an apple-packing plant in Oswego, pay less than half the $17 an hour she was making overseeing the machine sealing packages of Voila! ready-made meals at Birds Eye.
“There just doesn’t seem to be anything out there,” she said.
Portfolio Companies
Blackstone says it has a record of boosting employment overall. In 2011, Blackstone’s portfolio companies added 4.6 percent to their payrolls by creating new jobs, rather than through acquisitions, and increased them 3 percent in 2010, said Rose, the company spokesman. That outpaced job growth in the economy, he said.
“Private equity is a vital source of capital to grow and strengthen companies where public capital cannot or is unwilling to invest,” said Rose.
New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, the sole trustee of New York’s $140 billion retirement fund, declined to comment. New York City Comptroller John Liu declined to comment. John Cardillo, a spokesman for New York state’s Teachers’ Retirement System, declined to comment.
Drivers coming into Fulton are greeted by the red-brick Nestle chocolate factory, where for 103 years the company made condensed milk, semi-sweet morsels and Crunch Bars. It shut down in 2003.
The Nestle factory employed 1,500 people at its height. In 1994, Miller Brewing also shut down a plant just outside of town, putting 900 people out of work.
Taking Down Signs
A couple of years after Miller shut its operations, city officials took down signs on Routes 481, 48 and 3, the thoroughfares entering Fulton, that read: “City with a Future.”
It’s a far cry from the 1930s, when the New York Sun wrote a story about Fulton entitled “The Mystery of Fulton, N.Y., the City the Depression Missed.” Then, factories powered by electricity generated by the Oswego River, which bisects the town, churned out knives, textiles and shotguns. The Fort Stanwix Canning Co. opened a plant in Fulton in 1902. In 1938 it began packaging Birds Eye vegetables.
Two Decades
The Birds Eye plant had survived during the past two decades as it passed from General Foods Corp. to Philip Morris Cos. to Dean Foods Inc. In 1998, Dean Foods sold it to Agrilink Foods Inc. for $400 million. In 2002, Agrilink sold a majority stake in the company for $175 million to Vestar Capital Partners, a private equity firm where Melwani was a managing director. Melwani is now at Blackstone.
Vestar transformed the company. In 2006, it shifted focus to brand-named foods and developing new product lines. It announced that it would jettison most of its non-brand frozen food businesses, affecting five facilities, including three in western New York, that employed about 740. In 2007, Birds Eye borrowed money to pay Vestar and Agrilink a one-time $298.2 million dividend, according to corporate filings.
Vestar turned Birds Eye into a smaller, profitable company. By 2009, Birds Eye earned $54 million on sales of $936 million, compared with a $131 million loss and sales of $1 billion in 2002. Its workforce had shrunk to 1,700 from 4,000, filings show.
In November 2009, Pinnacle Foods, owned by Blackstone, agreed to buy Birds Eye for $1.3 billion. The purchase was financed by $1.15 billion of debt. Blackstone contributed $260 million in equity. Carol Makovich, a Vestar spokeswoman, declined to comment.
$17 Million
Blackstone affiliates were paid $17 million in acquisition fees for arranging the Birds Eye deal. Pinnacle has also paid Blackstone at least $15.5 million in management fees since it was taken over by the firm in 2007, according to company filings.
Under Blackstone, Birds Eye’s sales and profits have risen. In the quarter that ended in September, sales were $248 million, an 11.2 percent increase from the year earlier. The growth was driven by expanded distribution and demand for new products, in addition to lower new product distribution expenses, the company said in a filing.
Charles Murphy, 66, had worked at the Birds Eye plant in Fulton through a series of owners for 22 years before retiring at the end of 2010. He said employees were optimistic that the factory would survive.
Schumer Press Conference
In January 2010, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, held a press conference with workers in Fulton, saying he would keep pressuring the company until all the jobs were safe. Schumer said he called Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone’s chairman and co-founder, and asked him to spare the factory.
“No one expected that place to close,” said Murphy.
Then Pinnacle started cutting jobs. In mid-2010, it began closing down the Rochester, New York headquarters where 200 worked. That December it announced the closure of a Tacoma, Washington, plant that employed 160 and would shift production to Iowa.
On April 13, 2011, a Wednesday, employees coming to work at the Fulton plant saw a makeshift sign taped to a window: A mandatory meeting for all employees would be held at the Fulton War Memorial, the town’s exhibition hall and gymnasium on the 15th.
A Birds Eye lawyer told those gathered that the company would close the Fulton plant and move some of the jobs to Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Paul Robinson, a 59 year-old who ran packing machines remembered asking managers, “What can we do to keep the plant open?”
‘Minds Made Up’
Nothing, he said Pinnacle managers replied. “They had their minds made up.”
Wisconsin had offered Pinnacle $1.3 million in incentives to shift production to the state. Worker’s compensation costs were also lower — an average of $1,100 per employee in Wisconsin compared with $12,000 in New York, Mayor Woodward said.
While new jobs were added elsewhere, the closures cut the Birds Eye’s payroll by about 300, or 17 percent, as it eliminated more jobs than were added elsewhere, according to Weese, the Pinnacle spokeswoman. She said such costs are common after corporate mergers.
“Synergies are true with every deal. It’s not unique to this particular deal,” Weese said. “It’s less expensive to run one company than two.”
Not all public pensions have stood by as a private equity firms managing their money announced job cuts.
Hugo Boss
In 2010, after hearing that clothing-company Hugo Boss AG was planning to close a factory in a Cleveland suburb where it manufactured suits, threatening the jobs of 300 workers, Ohio’s public employee pension fund contacted Hugo Boss’s owner, London-based private equity firm Permira Advisers LLP.
Ohio’s Public Employees Retirement System had invested $80 million in the Permira fund that owned Hugo Boss. After writing to Permira and not getting a response, the pension fund followed up with another letter saying it would “think long and hard” about investing any more money with Permira, said Hugh Quill, a former Ohio pension trustees. The plant was never closed.
“These guys could have cared less about a plant in Cleveland, Ohio, but they did care about not having institutional investors for their next $500 million offering,” Quill said. “I think it was the right thing to do, given the amount of pain and suffering that was going on in the state.”
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System and public pensions from Maryland and Pennsylvania, which invested in Permira, also lobbied the firm. So did New York City’s pension funds.
Liu’s Letter
“New York’s pension funds do not wish to be investing in job loss or in a global ‘race to the bottom,’” New York City Comptroller Liu wrote in a letter to Permira.
Chris Davison, director of communications for Permira, declined to comment.
In Fulton, Charles Murphy’s wife, Donna, had been out on medical leave since October 2010 when the Birds Eye closure was announced. Still struggling with lung cancer, she lost her job when she couldn’t return to work for the factory’s last two months. That meant she didn’t get any severance pay. She worked there for 25 years.
Pinnacle’s Weese said details about medical leave and severance pay were worked out in negotiations with the employees’ union, Workers United Local 1822.
‘Devoting Your Life’
“You spend that many years devoting your life to the company, coming in to work every day, and they think nothing of you,” said Murphy, who lives in nearby Oswego. “This hurt a lot of people’s livelihoods.”
Fulton mayor Woodward, who was a maintenance supervisor with Nestle when the plant shut in 2003, said his story is another sign of the times.
“What you’re doing by doing that — you are systematically eliminating the middle class,” he said. “You’re going to be rich or you’re going to be poor. There’s no in between.”
–Editors: Jeffrey Taylor, Larry Edelman
To contact the reporters on this story: William Selway in Washington at wselway@bloomberg.net; Martin Braun in New York at mbraun6@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeffrey Taylor at Jtaylor48@bloomberg.net
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
2012年2月21日星期二
Experts split over private equity
Pension funds allocating their assets to private equity have reaped little or no rewards on average, according to a Yale study.
Martijn Cremers, associate professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, concluded in a recent paper that returns on private equity over the last 10 years were no better than the stock market. Investments in public equity were on average unlikely to yield more profit than investments in stocks or bonds, because of their high management fees. However, some experts disagreed with the findings, saying that private equity is still a good option for asset allocation.
According to the paper, private equity funds had a spectacular run in the 1990s where it returned an average net return of 21.5 percent to its investors. Impressed by this performance, institutional investors increased their investment in private equity, bringing the total funds in private equity from $200 million to $2 billion in the last 10 years. But the Midas touch of private equity disappeared at the turn of the century and the returns fell to an average of 4.5 percent in the last 10 years, the paper said.
“If I had to summarize it in a nutshell, pension funds got similar returns to what they would have gotten had they invested in passive equities,” Cremers said.
Since private equity is more volatile than stocks or bonds, a portfolio with a large asset allocation in it would have a high amount of risk. For example, the paper said, the net returns from private equity fell from a profit of 36 percent in 2000 to a loss of 21 percent the next year.
Even as the profits in private equity took a hit in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, private equity fees continued to climb. Cremers explained that in addition to taking a cut from the share of returns, known as the performance fee, private equity managers also charge an overall management fee on the invested capital. He said the average management fee has increased from 2.4 percent in 2000 to 4.2 percent in 2010. Private equity fund managers have taken 70 percent of the gross profits made in the last decade as fees, Cremers said.
Steven Kaplan, professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago, disagreed with the findings. According to his research, every dollar a pension fund put into private equity earned 20 percent more than it would have in Standard & Poor’s 500 index. Accounting for management and performance fees, he said, private equity funds have outperformed public markets by an average of three percentage points over the past 20 years.
Kaplan pinned the drastic difference in results on unreliable data.
“Cremers does not have particularly good performance data [but] we do,” Kaplan said.
In the past several studies have relied on commercial data sets provided by Thomson Venture Economics, which is problematic for analysis, Kaplan said.
Ayako Yasuda, associate professor of management at the University of California, Davis, shed light on the problems of gathering definitive data. Unlike pension funds, private equity funds are not legally required to disclose their activities, so all data available is based on voluntary disclosure, which is subject to bias.
“What’s missing is not just random noise,” Yasuda said. “Even a very small percentage of the missing data could mean that it is being systematically obstructed, which could create hidden bias.”
The difficulty in collecting data about private equity makes the field’s performance uncertain, if not controversial, Kaplan said.
Yasuda contended that the 4.5 percent average return, which Cremers calculated, is no worse than the turbulent performance of the stock markets in the last decade.
“It’s a period in which the benchmark also performed poorly,” Yasuda said.
She agreed private equity funds tend to have higher fees than other investment asset classes, but said the performance fees are typically structured to avoid consuming all the net returns for investors in low-performance funds.
In an underperforming market, private equity fees may seem exorbitant, but they are within reason during economic booms, such as the 1990s, Deputy SOM Dean Andrew Metrick said. Compared to a hedge fund, private equity charges a lot less, he said.
Metrick said that private equity funds also allow its institutional investors to invest in buyouts and ventures as partners, which means that pension funds may bypass a large portion of the overall fee. Such transactions are not included in Cremers’ data because they are not available to the researchers, Metrick said.
The key for pension fund managers is to find the right private equity investments, which requires enormous skill and long-term dedication, Metrick said.
For the unsophisticated investor, making investments in private equity funds is “like throwing darts at a newspaper,” he said.
The paper was co-authored by Aleksandar Andonov and Rob Bauer of Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
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Martijn Cremers, associate professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, concluded in a recent paper that returns on private equity over the last 10 years were no better than the stock market. Investments in public equity were on average unlikely to yield more profit than investments in stocks or bonds, because of their high management fees. However, some experts disagreed with the findings, saying that private equity is still a good option for asset allocation.
According to the paper, private equity funds had a spectacular run in the 1990s where it returned an average net return of 21.5 percent to its investors. Impressed by this performance, institutional investors increased their investment in private equity, bringing the total funds in private equity from $200 million to $2 billion in the last 10 years. But the Midas touch of private equity disappeared at the turn of the century and the returns fell to an average of 4.5 percent in the last 10 years, the paper said.
“If I had to summarize it in a nutshell, pension funds got similar returns to what they would have gotten had they invested in passive equities,” Cremers said.
Since private equity is more volatile than stocks or bonds, a portfolio with a large asset allocation in it would have a high amount of risk. For example, the paper said, the net returns from private equity fell from a profit of 36 percent in 2000 to a loss of 21 percent the next year.
Even as the profits in private equity took a hit in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, private equity fees continued to climb. Cremers explained that in addition to taking a cut from the share of returns, known as the performance fee, private equity managers also charge an overall management fee on the invested capital. He said the average management fee has increased from 2.4 percent in 2000 to 4.2 percent in 2010. Private equity fund managers have taken 70 percent of the gross profits made in the last decade as fees, Cremers said.
Steven Kaplan, professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago, disagreed with the findings. According to his research, every dollar a pension fund put into private equity earned 20 percent more than it would have in Standard & Poor’s 500 index. Accounting for management and performance fees, he said, private equity funds have outperformed public markets by an average of three percentage points over the past 20 years.
Kaplan pinned the drastic difference in results on unreliable data.
“Cremers does not have particularly good performance data [but] we do,” Kaplan said.
In the past several studies have relied on commercial data sets provided by Thomson Venture Economics, which is problematic for analysis, Kaplan said.
Ayako Yasuda, associate professor of management at the University of California, Davis, shed light on the problems of gathering definitive data. Unlike pension funds, private equity funds are not legally required to disclose their activities, so all data available is based on voluntary disclosure, which is subject to bias.
“What’s missing is not just random noise,” Yasuda said. “Even a very small percentage of the missing data could mean that it is being systematically obstructed, which could create hidden bias.”
The difficulty in collecting data about private equity makes the field’s performance uncertain, if not controversial, Kaplan said.
Yasuda contended that the 4.5 percent average return, which Cremers calculated, is no worse than the turbulent performance of the stock markets in the last decade.
“It’s a period in which the benchmark also performed poorly,” Yasuda said.
She agreed private equity funds tend to have higher fees than other investment asset classes, but said the performance fees are typically structured to avoid consuming all the net returns for investors in low-performance funds.
In an underperforming market, private equity fees may seem exorbitant, but they are within reason during economic booms, such as the 1990s, Deputy SOM Dean Andrew Metrick said. Compared to a hedge fund, private equity charges a lot less, he said.
Metrick said that private equity funds also allow its institutional investors to invest in buyouts and ventures as partners, which means that pension funds may bypass a large portion of the overall fee. Such transactions are not included in Cremers’ data because they are not available to the researchers, Metrick said.
The key for pension fund managers is to find the right private equity investments, which requires enormous skill and long-term dedication, Metrick said.
For the unsophisticated investor, making investments in private equity funds is “like throwing darts at a newspaper,” he said.
The paper was co-authored by Aleksandar Andonov and Rob Bauer of Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
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2012年2月20日星期一
Icelandic Anger Brings Debt Forgiveness in Best Recovery Story
February 20, 2012, 2:31 AM EST
By Omar R. Valdimarsson
Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) — Icelanders who pelted parliament with rocks in 2009 demanding their leaders and bankers answer for the country’s economic and financial collapse are reaping the benefits of their anger.
Since the end of 2008, the island’s banks have forgiven loans equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product, easing the debt burdens of more than a quarter of the population, according to a report published this month by the Icelandic Financial Services Association.
“You could safely say that Iceland holds the world record in household debt relief,” said Lars Christensen, chief emerging markets economist at Danske Bank A/S in Copenhagen. “Iceland followed the textbook example of what is required in a crisis. Any economist would agree with that.”
The island’s steps to resurrect itself since 2008, when its banks defaulted on $85 billion, are proving effective. Iceland’s economy will this year outgrow the euro area and the developed world on average, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates. It costs about the same to insure against an Icelandic default as it does to guard against a credit event in Belgium. Most polls now show Icelanders don’t want to join the European Union, where the debt crisis is in its third year.
The island’s households were helped by an agreement between the government and the banks, which are still partly controlled by the state, to forgive debt exceeding 110 percent of home values. On top of that, a Supreme Court ruling in June 2010 found loans indexed to foreign currencies were illegal, meaning households no longer need to cover krona losses.
Crisis Lessons
“The lesson to be learned from Iceland’s crisis is that if other countries think it’s necessary to write down debts, they should look at how successful the 110 percent agreement was here,” said Thorolfur Matthiasson, an economics professor at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, in an interview. “It’s the broadest agreement that’s been undertaken.”
Without the relief, homeowners would have buckled under the weight of their loans after the ratio of debt to incomes surged to 240 percent in 2008, Matthiasson said.
Iceland’s $13 billion economy, which shrank 6.7 percent in 2009, grew 2.9 percent last year and will expand 2.4 percent this year and next, the Paris-based OECD estimates. The euro area will grow 0.2 percent this year and the OECD area will expand 1.6 percent, according to November estimates.
Housing, measured as a subcomponent in the consumer price index, is now only about 3 percent below values in September 2008, just before the collapse. Fitch Ratings last week raised Iceland to investment grade, with a stable outlook, and said the island’s “unorthodox crisis policy response has succeeded.”
People Vs Markets
Iceland’s approach to dealing with the meltdown has put the needs of its population ahead of the markets at every turn.
Once it became clear back in October 2008 that the island’s banks were beyond saving, the government stepped in, ring-fenced the domestic accounts, and left international creditors in the lurch. The central bank imposed capital controls to halt the ensuing sell-off of the krona and new state-controlled banks were created from the remnants of the lenders that failed.
Activists say the banks should go even further in their debt relief. Andrea J. Olafsdottir, chairman of the Icelandic Homes Coalition, said she doubts the numbers provided by the banks are reliable.
“There are indications that some of the financial institutions in question haven’t lost a penny with the measures that they’ve undertaken,” she said.
Fresh Demands
According to Kristjan Kristjansson, a spokesman for Landsbankinn hf, the amount written off by the banks is probably larger than the 196.4 billion kronur ($1.6 billion) that the Financial Services Association estimates, since that figure only includes debt relief required by the courts or the government.
“There are still a lot of people facing difficulties; at the same time there are a lot of people doing fine,” Kristjansson said. “It’s nearly impossible to say when enough is enough; alongside every measure that is taken, there are fresh demands for further action.”
As a precursor to the global Occupy Wall Street movement and austerity protests across Europe, Icelanders took to the streets after the economic collapse in 2008. Protests escalated in early 2009, forcing police to use teargas to disperse crowds throwing rocks at parliament and the offices of then Prime Minister Geir Haarde. Parliament is still deciding whether to press ahead with an indictment that was brought against him in September 2009 for his role in the crisis.
A new coalition, led by Social Democrat Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, was voted into office in early 2009. The authorities are now investigating most of the main protagonists of the banking meltdown.
Legal Aftermath
Iceland’s special prosecutor has said it may indict as many as 90 people, while more than 200, including the former chief executives at the three biggest banks, face criminal charges.
Larus Welding, the former CEO of Glitnir Bank hf, once Iceland’s second biggest, was indicted in December for granting illegal loans and is now waiting to stand trial. The former CEO of Landsbanki Islands hf, Sigurjon Arnason, has endured stints of solitary confinement as his criminal investigation continues.
That compares with the U.S., where no top bank executives have faced criminal prosecution for their roles in the subprime mortgage meltdown. The Securities and Exchange Commission said last year it had sanctioned 39 senior officers for conduct related to the housing market meltdown.
The U.S. subprime crisis sent home prices plunging 33 percent from a 2006 peak. While households there don’t face the same degree of debt relief as that pushed through in Iceland, President Barack Obama this month proposed plans to expand loan modifications, including some principal reductions.
According to Christensen at Danske Bank, “the bottom line is that if households are insolvent, then the banks just have to go along with it, regardless of the interests of the banks.”
–Editors: Jonas Bergman, Tasneem Brogger.
To contact the reporter on this story: Omar R. Valdimarsson in Reykjavik valdimarsson@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonas Bergman at jbergman@bloomberg.nethttp://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
By Omar R. Valdimarsson
Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) — Icelanders who pelted parliament with rocks in 2009 demanding their leaders and bankers answer for the country’s economic and financial collapse are reaping the benefits of their anger.
Since the end of 2008, the island’s banks have forgiven loans equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product, easing the debt burdens of more than a quarter of the population, according to a report published this month by the Icelandic Financial Services Association.
“You could safely say that Iceland holds the world record in household debt relief,” said Lars Christensen, chief emerging markets economist at Danske Bank A/S in Copenhagen. “Iceland followed the textbook example of what is required in a crisis. Any economist would agree with that.”
The island’s steps to resurrect itself since 2008, when its banks defaulted on $85 billion, are proving effective. Iceland’s economy will this year outgrow the euro area and the developed world on average, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates. It costs about the same to insure against an Icelandic default as it does to guard against a credit event in Belgium. Most polls now show Icelanders don’t want to join the European Union, where the debt crisis is in its third year.
The island’s households were helped by an agreement between the government and the banks, which are still partly controlled by the state, to forgive debt exceeding 110 percent of home values. On top of that, a Supreme Court ruling in June 2010 found loans indexed to foreign currencies were illegal, meaning households no longer need to cover krona losses.
Crisis Lessons
“The lesson to be learned from Iceland’s crisis is that if other countries think it’s necessary to write down debts, they should look at how successful the 110 percent agreement was here,” said Thorolfur Matthiasson, an economics professor at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, in an interview. “It’s the broadest agreement that’s been undertaken.”
Without the relief, homeowners would have buckled under the weight of their loans after the ratio of debt to incomes surged to 240 percent in 2008, Matthiasson said.
Iceland’s $13 billion economy, which shrank 6.7 percent in 2009, grew 2.9 percent last year and will expand 2.4 percent this year and next, the Paris-based OECD estimates. The euro area will grow 0.2 percent this year and the OECD area will expand 1.6 percent, according to November estimates.
Housing, measured as a subcomponent in the consumer price index, is now only about 3 percent below values in September 2008, just before the collapse. Fitch Ratings last week raised Iceland to investment grade, with a stable outlook, and said the island’s “unorthodox crisis policy response has succeeded.”
People Vs Markets
Iceland’s approach to dealing with the meltdown has put the needs of its population ahead of the markets at every turn.
Once it became clear back in October 2008 that the island’s banks were beyond saving, the government stepped in, ring-fenced the domestic accounts, and left international creditors in the lurch. The central bank imposed capital controls to halt the ensuing sell-off of the krona and new state-controlled banks were created from the remnants of the lenders that failed.
Activists say the banks should go even further in their debt relief. Andrea J. Olafsdottir, chairman of the Icelandic Homes Coalition, said she doubts the numbers provided by the banks are reliable.
“There are indications that some of the financial institutions in question haven’t lost a penny with the measures that they’ve undertaken,” she said.
Fresh Demands
According to Kristjan Kristjansson, a spokesman for Landsbankinn hf, the amount written off by the banks is probably larger than the 196.4 billion kronur ($1.6 billion) that the Financial Services Association estimates, since that figure only includes debt relief required by the courts or the government.
“There are still a lot of people facing difficulties; at the same time there are a lot of people doing fine,” Kristjansson said. “It’s nearly impossible to say when enough is enough; alongside every measure that is taken, there are fresh demands for further action.”
As a precursor to the global Occupy Wall Street movement and austerity protests across Europe, Icelanders took to the streets after the economic collapse in 2008. Protests escalated in early 2009, forcing police to use teargas to disperse crowds throwing rocks at parliament and the offices of then Prime Minister Geir Haarde. Parliament is still deciding whether to press ahead with an indictment that was brought against him in September 2009 for his role in the crisis.
A new coalition, led by Social Democrat Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, was voted into office in early 2009. The authorities are now investigating most of the main protagonists of the banking meltdown.
Legal Aftermath
Iceland’s special prosecutor has said it may indict as many as 90 people, while more than 200, including the former chief executives at the three biggest banks, face criminal charges.
Larus Welding, the former CEO of Glitnir Bank hf, once Iceland’s second biggest, was indicted in December for granting illegal loans and is now waiting to stand trial. The former CEO of Landsbanki Islands hf, Sigurjon Arnason, has endured stints of solitary confinement as his criminal investigation continues.
That compares with the U.S., where no top bank executives have faced criminal prosecution for their roles in the subprime mortgage meltdown. The Securities and Exchange Commission said last year it had sanctioned 39 senior officers for conduct related to the housing market meltdown.
The U.S. subprime crisis sent home prices plunging 33 percent from a 2006 peak. While households there don’t face the same degree of debt relief as that pushed through in Iceland, President Barack Obama this month proposed plans to expand loan modifications, including some principal reductions.
According to Christensen at Danske Bank, “the bottom line is that if households are insolvent, then the banks just have to go along with it, regardless of the interests of the banks.”
–Editors: Jonas Bergman, Tasneem Brogger.
To contact the reporter on this story: Omar R. Valdimarsson in Reykjavik valdimarsson@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonas Bergman at jbergman@bloomberg.nethttp://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
2012年2月13日星期一
Online ads startup snags $30 million from Temasek, SAP
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Marin Software, a startup that publishes applications used to manage online advertising campaigns, has raised $30 million in a new investment round led by Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings.
Temasek was joined by SAP Ventures, the investment arm of SAP AG, Europe’s largest enterprise software firm, as well as previous investors including Benchmark Capital, Crosslink Capital and DAG Ventures.
The San Francisco-based company also announced on Monday that it has added Frank van Veenendaal, a top global sales executive at Salesforce.com, to its board.
The latest moves are meant to help Marin acquire new customers, especially in Asia, where the company looks to focus its expansion, Chris Lien, Marin’s chief executive officer, said in an interview.
Temasek will help Marin “with potential customer introductions and local market knowledge,” Lien said.
“They’ve been operating in these emerging markets for years and years.”
Marin’s products have been adopted by clients like Hotels.com, Macy’s and the University of Phoenix. The company is still focused on managing ads across search engines like Google and Yahoo, but Lien said his company is beginning to incorporate into its platform tools to manage campaigns on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Richard Pullin)
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Temasek was joined by SAP Ventures, the investment arm of SAP AG, Europe’s largest enterprise software firm, as well as previous investors including Benchmark Capital, Crosslink Capital and DAG Ventures.
The San Francisco-based company also announced on Monday that it has added Frank van Veenendaal, a top global sales executive at Salesforce.com, to its board.
The latest moves are meant to help Marin acquire new customers, especially in Asia, where the company looks to focus its expansion, Chris Lien, Marin’s chief executive officer, said in an interview.
Temasek will help Marin “with potential customer introductions and local market knowledge,” Lien said.
“They’ve been operating in these emerging markets for years and years.”
Marin’s products have been adopted by clients like Hotels.com, Macy’s and the University of Phoenix. The company is still focused on managing ads across search engines like Google and Yahoo, but Lien said his company is beginning to incorporate into its platform tools to manage campaigns on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Richard Pullin)
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The Longevity Opportunity in the U.S. is Comparable to Emerging BRIC Markets
Lafayette, California (PRWEB) February 13, 2012
In 2011 the first of the baby boomer generation began turning 65 years old. Near daily stories in the media are generated about the issues, needs, impact, influence and sheer size of the eldest of our population. The growing discourse includes changes to retirement trends, the fact that the 55+ age group is the fastest-growing segment of entrepreneurs, the call to advertisers that they can no longer afford to ignore this audience, and announcements of new outlets catering to these demographics. From aging-in-place technologies to social and mobile media, to the spending power of grandparents, the overall wealth of opportunities in meeting the needs of this mature market is the purpose of the ninth annual What’s Next Boomer Business Summit, being held March 28 in Washington, D.C. There the country’s leading analysts, top researchers and executive strategists will gather to introduce new research, products and services, and to present the definitive ways to reach and successfully sell to baby boomers and senior consumers. It is the event to meet the entrepreneurs and brand teams pursuing the baby boomer customer, and learn the marketing strategies that work to reach them.
It opens with a keynote delivered by veteran political strategist Donna Brazile, on ‘Designing a Personalized Business Model for the New Economy’. Jody Holtzman, SVP of Thought Leadership Group at AARP will define and examine the entrepreneurial and market opportunities related to the new Longevity Economy. His keynote will unearth current economic activity related to the demographic phenomenon of people living longer, richer lives and will address areas where the needs and wants of Americans 45 and older are not being met. Also, he will present a new framework for approaching both the societal needs and economic opportunities related to a changing and vital population.
The event tracks will explore trends in the following areas, with agenda highlights:
The complete list of speakers is available at http://www.boomersummit.com/speakers.html.
“The boomer, senior and caregiver markets are large and growing. The changing economy has created a shift in spending that is becoming the new normal. This conference brings together the most innovative companies and top thought leaders in marketing, innovation and distribution,” Mary Furlong, What’s Next conference producer shared. “These markets are growing as rapidly as the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Join us in March to discover the important segments in the longevity economy.”
A press conference will take place on March 29 at 11:00 a.m. at the National Press Club. Speakers and sponsors will be making their new research product and service announcements.
Sponsors of What’s Next Boomer Business Summit are, at the platinum level: AARP, UnitedHealthcare and Crew Media; at the gold level: Microsoft, Linkage, Silverado Senior Living, MBO Partners, RLTV and Caring.com; at the silver level: General Mills, Google, GreatCall, Facetime Strategy, The Hartford, SilverRide, GrandCare Systems, Innovate LTC, Independa Inc., Starkey; at the bronze level: ABHOW, Hipcricket, Posit Science, MetLife Mature Market Institute, VibrantNation; refreshment break sponsor is Moving Mavens and Moving Solutions.
Registration, agenda and additional event details available at http://www.boomersummit.com. Registration costs are $275 at early bird rate (extended to February 21), $350 at the advance rate (February 22 to March 26) and $450 on March 27 and onsite.
What’s Next Boomer Business Summit
The ninth Annual What’s Next Boomer Business Summit is produced by Mary Furlong & Associates. What’s Next Boomer Business Summit is affiliated with the American Society on Aging (ASA) Aging in America Conference being held on March 28 to April 1, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Registration and program information is available at http://www.boomersummit.com. Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/2012-Whats-Next-Boomer-Business-Summit. Twitter username is WhatsNextBoomer, and hashtag is #boomersummit. It is produced by Mary Furlong & Associates.
Mary Furlong & Associates
Founded in 2003, Mary Furlong & Associates (MFA) works with companies seeking to capitalize on new business and investment opportunities in the Baby Boomer market. MFA provides business development, financing strategy and integrated marketing solutions to entrepreneurs, corporations and non-profit organizations serving the 50+ market. Mary Furlong, Ed.D., the firm’s founder and CEO, has guided the offline and online 40+ market strategies of leading corporations and non-profit organizations for more than 20 years. In 2011, Furlong was honored as one of the top 100 Women of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Furlong is Dean’s Executive Professor of Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, and previously founded SeniorNet and ThirdAge Media. Her latest book, Turning Silver into Gold: How to Profit in the New Boomer Marketplace (FT Press), was published in 2007. More information available at http://www.maryfurlong.com.
http://tourism9.cm/ http://vkins.com/
In 2011 the first of the baby boomer generation began turning 65 years old. Near daily stories in the media are generated about the issues, needs, impact, influence and sheer size of the eldest of our population. The growing discourse includes changes to retirement trends, the fact that the 55+ age group is the fastest-growing segment of entrepreneurs, the call to advertisers that they can no longer afford to ignore this audience, and announcements of new outlets catering to these demographics. From aging-in-place technologies to social and mobile media, to the spending power of grandparents, the overall wealth of opportunities in meeting the needs of this mature market is the purpose of the ninth annual What’s Next Boomer Business Summit, being held March 28 in Washington, D.C. There the country’s leading analysts, top researchers and executive strategists will gather to introduce new research, products and services, and to present the definitive ways to reach and successfully sell to baby boomers and senior consumers. It is the event to meet the entrepreneurs and brand teams pursuing the baby boomer customer, and learn the marketing strategies that work to reach them.
It opens with a keynote delivered by veteran political strategist Donna Brazile, on ‘Designing a Personalized Business Model for the New Economy’. Jody Holtzman, SVP of Thought Leadership Group at AARP will define and examine the entrepreneurial and market opportunities related to the new Longevity Economy. His keynote will unearth current economic activity related to the demographic phenomenon of people living longer, richer lives and will address areas where the needs and wants of Americans 45 and older are not being met. Also, he will present a new framework for approaching both the societal needs and economic opportunities related to a changing and vital population.
The event tracks will explore trends in the following areas, with agenda highlights:
- Innovation and frugality
- Baby boomers have the money and desire to bond with their grandchildren, but given today’s investment climate, will there be money in the future for them to inherit? Moderator Lori Bitter, President, Crew Media, will get Jodi Olshevski, Assistant VP, The Hartford, Robert Stephen, VP, My Home & Family Portfolio, IVS-Portfolio Management, AARP, and Sandy Timmermann, Assistant Vice President, MetLife and Director of the MetLife Mature Market Institute to tell what are the changes and choices in work, retirement, and for money protection that older adults can make to thrive in the age of lowered expectations.
- It is the mature consumer segment that is currently generating the most interest and excitement–grandparents. The grandparent economy is large (40 million), growing and lucrative. Grandparents are spending money on necessities, learning and luxury for their grandchildren. They are investing in tuition, tutoring, and technology. Missy Sullivan, Senior Editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money, and Robert Stephen, VP, My Home & Family Portfolio, IVS-Portfolio Management, AARP, identify the business ecosystem of brands baby boomers are embracing with this new role.
- Baby boomer women are the chief purchasing officers, chief caregiving officers, and chief healthcare officers for their families. They often influence purchase decisions in travel and investment for themselves and extended families. Myrna Blyth, Editor in Chief of ThirdAge.com shares insights from her inspiring panel of women in new media and business.
- Integrated media and marketing, social, mobile, gaming
- Moderated by Deborah Jacobs of Forbes, the ‘Tech Trends’ session will answer what mature consumers want most from their smart phones, tablets, and the Internet itself. Laurie Orlov, Founder, Aging in Place Technology Watch, and Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, will present the latest data to answer this, and discuss how that information can drive investment and strategies of companies small and large.
- ‘Boomer Trends in E-tailing, Retailing and Mobile Commerce’ session delves into dramatic changes in consumer buying behavior in an online and mobile world. It is forcing retailers to think, staff and partner in new ways. Moderated by Gail Kirby, PhD, Marketing, Santa Clara University, she will have Jeff Hasen, CMO, Hipcricket and Candace Corlett, President, WSL Strategic Retail navigate the multiple-channel world of today.
- Attendees will discover the latest trends in how companies are using media to drive leads, with industry leaders that include AARP’s Director of Social Communications & Strategy, Tammy Gordon.
- Beth Carpenter, Digital Distribution, AARP brings with her one of the many bright minds from Google for the in-demand session ‘Using Google, Facebook and Twitter to Build Your Business’ that will aid businesses by showing them how to leverage Google’s many free products to maximize web traffic, conduct search engine optimization, and use tools such as Ad Words, Twitter, and Facebook to connect and engage potential customers.
- The new service economy of housing, caregiving, mobility and healthcare
- The prospect of a stalled homebuilding industry creating a surge in age-in-place remodeling is explored by Steve French, Managing Director, Natural Marketing Institute (NMI), and Gail Gibson Hunt, President & CEO, National Alliance for Caregiving. They explain why wireless home health technology will blossom in the face of health reform, and debate if the growing number of caregivers (and their policy influence) will get the attention of Congress.
- The ‘Health Services 3.0’ panel will consider the businesses that are meeting baby boomers on their technology platform of choice when it comes to managing their health. Examining the burgeoning mHealth realm, this panel will include Jeff Shoemate, Vice President of Innovation & Business Development, United Healthcare-Medicare & Retirement, Ilya Oshman, SVP, FP&A, Weight Watchers and Charlotte Yeh, Chief Medical Officer, AARP.
- Entrepreneurship and encore careers
- With increased longevity, and a need and desire to work, boomers are exploring encore careers in record numbers. Mary Furlong, President & CEO, Mary Furlong & Associates, and Gene Zanlo, CEO, MBO Partners, will explore the fields with the greatest growth and case studies of those who are reimagining life anew.
The complete list of speakers is available at http://www.boomersummit.com/speakers.html.
“The boomer, senior and caregiver markets are large and growing. The changing economy has created a shift in spending that is becoming the new normal. This conference brings together the most innovative companies and top thought leaders in marketing, innovation and distribution,” Mary Furlong, What’s Next conference producer shared. “These markets are growing as rapidly as the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Join us in March to discover the important segments in the longevity economy.”
A press conference will take place on March 29 at 11:00 a.m. at the National Press Club. Speakers and sponsors will be making their new research product and service announcements.
Sponsors of What’s Next Boomer Business Summit are, at the platinum level: AARP, UnitedHealthcare and Crew Media; at the gold level: Microsoft, Linkage, Silverado Senior Living, MBO Partners, RLTV and Caring.com; at the silver level: General Mills, Google, GreatCall, Facetime Strategy, The Hartford, SilverRide, GrandCare Systems, Innovate LTC, Independa Inc., Starkey; at the bronze level: ABHOW, Hipcricket, Posit Science, MetLife Mature Market Institute, VibrantNation; refreshment break sponsor is Moving Mavens and Moving Solutions.
Registration, agenda and additional event details available at http://www.boomersummit.com. Registration costs are $275 at early bird rate (extended to February 21), $350 at the advance rate (February 22 to March 26) and $450 on March 27 and onsite.
What’s Next Boomer Business Summit
The ninth Annual What’s Next Boomer Business Summit is produced by Mary Furlong & Associates. What’s Next Boomer Business Summit is affiliated with the American Society on Aging (ASA) Aging in America Conference being held on March 28 to April 1, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Registration and program information is available at http://www.boomersummit.com. Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/2012-Whats-Next-Boomer-Business-Summit. Twitter username is WhatsNextBoomer, and hashtag is #boomersummit. It is produced by Mary Furlong & Associates.
Mary Furlong & Associates
Founded in 2003, Mary Furlong & Associates (MFA) works with companies seeking to capitalize on new business and investment opportunities in the Baby Boomer market. MFA provides business development, financing strategy and integrated marketing solutions to entrepreneurs, corporations and non-profit organizations serving the 50+ market. Mary Furlong, Ed.D., the firm’s founder and CEO, has guided the offline and online 40+ market strategies of leading corporations and non-profit organizations for more than 20 years. In 2011, Furlong was honored as one of the top 100 Women of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Furlong is Dean’s Executive Professor of Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, and previously founded SeniorNet and ThirdAge Media. Her latest book, Turning Silver into Gold: How to Profit in the New Boomer Marketplace (FT Press), was published in 2007. More information available at http://www.maryfurlong.com.
http://tourism9.cm/ http://vkins.com/
2012年2月7日星期二
Private-Equity Lobbying Helped Protect Romney’s Tax Benefits
February 07, 2012, 7:18 AM EST
By Steven Sloan
Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) — The largest U.S. private-equity funds and venture capital firms have relied on a five-year, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to protect the carried interest tax break that helped drive presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s 2010 effective tax rate below 14 percent.
With the issue gaining attention in this year’s U.S. presidential election campaign, the investment industry is again girding to defend its preferential tax treatment. Blackstone Group LP alone spent $5 million in 2011 lobbying Congress on issues including the tax treatment of carried interest.
“If anything preserves the status quo, it will be the very heavy lobbying campaign,” said Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “There’s no other reason for the subsidy to survive.”
Opponents of the tax rate for carried interest see this as an opportunity to press for change. Romney released his 2010 tax returns on Jan. 24, revealing he paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent on income of $21.6 million.
Romney, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts and co-founder of Bain Capital LLC, has come to personify the debate over whether the carried interest paid to private-equity managers should be taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent while ordinary income is taxed at rates as high as 35 percent.
Tax Fairness Debate
Democrats view the carried interest issue as an element of the tax fairness theme that President Barack Obama is highlighting in his re-election campaign. Representative Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, plans to introduce a bill as soon as this week that would tax carried interest at the same rate as regular income, according to spokesman Josh Drobnyk. The bill probably won’t advance in the Republican-controlled chamber this year.
Carried interest is the profits-based compensation that private-equity managers, real estate investors and members of oil and gas partnerships often receive. They get a portion of their clients’ earnings as investment income if the underlying earnings are treated that way. Levin and Obama call carried interest compensation for work, which they say should be viewed like wages for tax purposes.
Private-equity firms invested more than $148 billion in 1,234 U.S.-based companies in 2010, according to the Private Equity Growth Capital Council. The industry says it employs more than 8 million people.
Washington Lobbyists
Companies opposed to changing the tax treatment of carried interest have hired veteran Washington lobbyists to make their case. Wayne Berman of Ogilvy Government Relations is Blackstone’s top lobbyist on the issue. He was an assistant commerce secretary during George H.W. Bush’s administration. Other Ogilvy lobbyists working for Blackstone include Drew Maloney, who was a staffer for former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, and Moses Mercado, the former House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt’s deputy chief of staff.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. hired former Representative Vic Fazio, a California Democrat, to work with Congress on “tax issues affecting private-equity firms and their portfolio companies,” according to lobbying records. The New York-based private-equity company spent $150,000 in the fourth quarter on lobbyists from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld to work on issues that included tax policy.
Bain spent $80,000 during the fourth quarter to hire lobbyists from Public Strategies Washington Inc. to “monitor tax reform developments,” lobbying records show. Joseph O’Neill and Paul Snyder are lobbying for Romney’s former company.
O’Neill was chief of staff to former Senate Finance Committee Chairman Lloyd Bentsen and helped run the late Texas Democrat’s 1988 vice presidential bid. Snyder was a legislative assistant to former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, the late Massachusetts Democrat.
Budget Deficit
Raising taxes on carried interest compensation wouldn’t do much to narrow the U.S. budget deficit. In its fiscal 2012 budget request, the Obama administration said the proposal to tax carried interest as ordinary income would generate $14.8 billion over 10 years. In December, the deficit stood at almost $1.3 trillion.
The issue has divided Congress along mostly partisan lines. The last time the Senate considered a bill that would have increased taxes on carried interest — in June 2010 — every Republican voted against it, preventing the bill from advancing. Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska was the only Democrat to oppose the legislation.
Few Defections
The same bill was passed in the House that year with 15 lawmakers in each party voting against their leaders.
As the debate over carried-interest taxation advanced in Congress, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council was formed in February 2007 so the industry could make its case more directly to lawmakers.
The group, whose members include the Carlyle Group LP, based in Washington, and New York-based Blackstone spent about $2.5 million that year lobbying Congress on issues that included measures to tax carried interest at the same rate as ordinary income. It spent $2.2 million on lobbying in 2011.
“We believe that tax policy should incentivize the kind of entrepreneurial risk-taking that private-equity firms take every day,” said Ken Spain, a spokesman for the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, a trade group based in Washington. “We remain vigilant in respect to this issue. Private equity as an asset class is going to be a topic of discussion throughout 2012.”
Spain is a former communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Comprehensive Overhaul
While the issue will be a central one in the presidential campaign and on Capitol Hill, the taxation of carried interest probably won’t change until Congress considers a comprehensive tax-code overhaul. That would be difficult to enact before 2013.
One potential challenge for private equity is something that otherwise would be seen as a favorable development for the industry: a Romney administration. Ending the preferential treatment of capital gains if Romney wins the presidency could dissolve notions that he is a captive to his former industry, said Martin Sullivan, a contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a nonprofit organization in Falls Church, Virginia.
“It will be much easier to repeal if Mitt Romney becomes president than if Mr. Obama remains president,” he said.
Still, Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told reporters last month that the Republican presidential candidate thinks carried interest should be taxed at the same rate as a capital gain. The candidate has proposed eliminating the tax on capital gains for those with adjusted gross incomes of less than $200,000 a year.
‘Convoluted’ Code
Private-equity executives also rely on fairness arguments to make their case. In a Jan. 27 appearance on Bloomberg Television, Steve Pagliuca, the managing partner of Bain Capital, said the tax code is “convoluted” and “almost unintelligible.”
“We’ve got to have a fair tax code,” he said. “We don’t wake up every day saying ‘Well, what’s the tax code?’ We wake up trying to build great businesses and we pay all of the taxes that are necessary.”
Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, an industry trade group based in Arlington, Virginia, said his industry often reminds lawmakers of its differences from other investors such as private-equity firms. Venture capital firms typically invest in early-stage companies and don’t use as much leverage as private-equity investors do.
Creating Something
“We are able to demonstrate our belief that quintessential capital gains are all about creating something out of nothing,” he said. “That’s what venture capital does.”
Heesen said his message to Congress is that it’s important to maintain the link between carried interest and capital gains, even if the capital gains tax rate increases. Unless Congress acts, such gains will be taxed at 20 percent in 2013. High earners will face an additional 3.8 percent tax on capital gains and other unearned income as part of the 2010 health-care law.
On the other side of the issue is the AFL-CIO, which has lobbied in favor of changing how carried interest is taxed, and is prepared to do so again. Damon Silvers, the policy director for the labor organization in Washington, called the treatment of carried interest a “tax subsidy for leveraged buyouts.”
“We are going to be pressing the carried interest issue at whatever opportunity we get,” he said. “Mitt Romney’s tax returns are the world’s greatest educational tool about the impact of the carried-interest loophole.”
The AFL-CIO spent $1.1 million in 2007 to lobby Congress on issues that included a Senate bill to raise taxes on carried interest.
Lobbying on the carried-interest debate is only part of the reason the tax break has survived, said David Donnelly, the national campaigns director at the Public Campaign Action Fund, a Washington nonprofit group that tracks political contributions. Investors who are paid in carried interest are often the well-heeled donors that members of both parties turn to for campaign contributions, he said.
“I don’t think it’s simply the lobbying,” Donnelly said. “The people who are interested in this particular provision are high net-worth individuals. That’s a constituency that Congress always cares about when they have to raise money to fund their campaigns.”
–With assistance from Richard Rubin in Washington and Cristina Alesci in New York. Editors: Jodi Schneider, Robin Meszoly
To contact the reporter on this story: Steven Sloan in Washington at ssloan7@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jodi Schneider at jschneider50@bloomberg.net
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
By Steven Sloan
Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) — The largest U.S. private-equity funds and venture capital firms have relied on a five-year, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to protect the carried interest tax break that helped drive presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s 2010 effective tax rate below 14 percent.
With the issue gaining attention in this year’s U.S. presidential election campaign, the investment industry is again girding to defend its preferential tax treatment. Blackstone Group LP alone spent $5 million in 2011 lobbying Congress on issues including the tax treatment of carried interest.
“If anything preserves the status quo, it will be the very heavy lobbying campaign,” said Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “There’s no other reason for the subsidy to survive.”
Opponents of the tax rate for carried interest see this as an opportunity to press for change. Romney released his 2010 tax returns on Jan. 24, revealing he paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent on income of $21.6 million.
Romney, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts and co-founder of Bain Capital LLC, has come to personify the debate over whether the carried interest paid to private-equity managers should be taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent while ordinary income is taxed at rates as high as 35 percent.
Tax Fairness Debate
Democrats view the carried interest issue as an element of the tax fairness theme that President Barack Obama is highlighting in his re-election campaign. Representative Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, plans to introduce a bill as soon as this week that would tax carried interest at the same rate as regular income, according to spokesman Josh Drobnyk. The bill probably won’t advance in the Republican-controlled chamber this year.
Carried interest is the profits-based compensation that private-equity managers, real estate investors and members of oil and gas partnerships often receive. They get a portion of their clients’ earnings as investment income if the underlying earnings are treated that way. Levin and Obama call carried interest compensation for work, which they say should be viewed like wages for tax purposes.
Private-equity firms invested more than $148 billion in 1,234 U.S.-based companies in 2010, according to the Private Equity Growth Capital Council. The industry says it employs more than 8 million people.
Washington Lobbyists
Companies opposed to changing the tax treatment of carried interest have hired veteran Washington lobbyists to make their case. Wayne Berman of Ogilvy Government Relations is Blackstone’s top lobbyist on the issue. He was an assistant commerce secretary during George H.W. Bush’s administration. Other Ogilvy lobbyists working for Blackstone include Drew Maloney, who was a staffer for former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, and Moses Mercado, the former House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt’s deputy chief of staff.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. hired former Representative Vic Fazio, a California Democrat, to work with Congress on “tax issues affecting private-equity firms and their portfolio companies,” according to lobbying records. The New York-based private-equity company spent $150,000 in the fourth quarter on lobbyists from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld to work on issues that included tax policy.
Bain spent $80,000 during the fourth quarter to hire lobbyists from Public Strategies Washington Inc. to “monitor tax reform developments,” lobbying records show. Joseph O’Neill and Paul Snyder are lobbying for Romney’s former company.
O’Neill was chief of staff to former Senate Finance Committee Chairman Lloyd Bentsen and helped run the late Texas Democrat’s 1988 vice presidential bid. Snyder was a legislative assistant to former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, the late Massachusetts Democrat.
Budget Deficit
Raising taxes on carried interest compensation wouldn’t do much to narrow the U.S. budget deficit. In its fiscal 2012 budget request, the Obama administration said the proposal to tax carried interest as ordinary income would generate $14.8 billion over 10 years. In December, the deficit stood at almost $1.3 trillion.
The issue has divided Congress along mostly partisan lines. The last time the Senate considered a bill that would have increased taxes on carried interest — in June 2010 — every Republican voted against it, preventing the bill from advancing. Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska was the only Democrat to oppose the legislation.
Few Defections
The same bill was passed in the House that year with 15 lawmakers in each party voting against their leaders.
As the debate over carried-interest taxation advanced in Congress, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council was formed in February 2007 so the industry could make its case more directly to lawmakers.
The group, whose members include the Carlyle Group LP, based in Washington, and New York-based Blackstone spent about $2.5 million that year lobbying Congress on issues that included measures to tax carried interest at the same rate as ordinary income. It spent $2.2 million on lobbying in 2011.
“We believe that tax policy should incentivize the kind of entrepreneurial risk-taking that private-equity firms take every day,” said Ken Spain, a spokesman for the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, a trade group based in Washington. “We remain vigilant in respect to this issue. Private equity as an asset class is going to be a topic of discussion throughout 2012.”
Spain is a former communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Comprehensive Overhaul
While the issue will be a central one in the presidential campaign and on Capitol Hill, the taxation of carried interest probably won’t change until Congress considers a comprehensive tax-code overhaul. That would be difficult to enact before 2013.
One potential challenge for private equity is something that otherwise would be seen as a favorable development for the industry: a Romney administration. Ending the preferential treatment of capital gains if Romney wins the presidency could dissolve notions that he is a captive to his former industry, said Martin Sullivan, a contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a nonprofit organization in Falls Church, Virginia.
“It will be much easier to repeal if Mitt Romney becomes president than if Mr. Obama remains president,” he said.
Still, Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told reporters last month that the Republican presidential candidate thinks carried interest should be taxed at the same rate as a capital gain. The candidate has proposed eliminating the tax on capital gains for those with adjusted gross incomes of less than $200,000 a year.
‘Convoluted’ Code
Private-equity executives also rely on fairness arguments to make their case. In a Jan. 27 appearance on Bloomberg Television, Steve Pagliuca, the managing partner of Bain Capital, said the tax code is “convoluted” and “almost unintelligible.”
“We’ve got to have a fair tax code,” he said. “We don’t wake up every day saying ‘Well, what’s the tax code?’ We wake up trying to build great businesses and we pay all of the taxes that are necessary.”
Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, an industry trade group based in Arlington, Virginia, said his industry often reminds lawmakers of its differences from other investors such as private-equity firms. Venture capital firms typically invest in early-stage companies and don’t use as much leverage as private-equity investors do.
Creating Something
“We are able to demonstrate our belief that quintessential capital gains are all about creating something out of nothing,” he said. “That’s what venture capital does.”
Heesen said his message to Congress is that it’s important to maintain the link between carried interest and capital gains, even if the capital gains tax rate increases. Unless Congress acts, such gains will be taxed at 20 percent in 2013. High earners will face an additional 3.8 percent tax on capital gains and other unearned income as part of the 2010 health-care law.
On the other side of the issue is the AFL-CIO, which has lobbied in favor of changing how carried interest is taxed, and is prepared to do so again. Damon Silvers, the policy director for the labor organization in Washington, called the treatment of carried interest a “tax subsidy for leveraged buyouts.”
“We are going to be pressing the carried interest issue at whatever opportunity we get,” he said. “Mitt Romney’s tax returns are the world’s greatest educational tool about the impact of the carried-interest loophole.”
The AFL-CIO spent $1.1 million in 2007 to lobby Congress on issues that included a Senate bill to raise taxes on carried interest.
Lobbying on the carried-interest debate is only part of the reason the tax break has survived, said David Donnelly, the national campaigns director at the Public Campaign Action Fund, a Washington nonprofit group that tracks political contributions. Investors who are paid in carried interest are often the well-heeled donors that members of both parties turn to for campaign contributions, he said.
“I don’t think it’s simply the lobbying,” Donnelly said. “The people who are interested in this particular provision are high net-worth individuals. That’s a constituency that Congress always cares about when they have to raise money to fund their campaigns.”
–With assistance from Richard Rubin in Washington and Cristina Alesci in New York. Editors: Jodi Schneider, Robin Meszoly
To contact the reporter on this story: Steven Sloan in Washington at ssloan7@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jodi Schneider at jschneider50@bloomberg.net
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
2012年2月1日星期三
Federal plan to extend deferred fees to TAFE
Thousands of Canberra students wanting to study a vocational course may be thrown a financial lifeline as the Federal Government plans extending HECS-style loans to TAFE fees.
The Canberra Institute of Technology cautiously welcomed the announcement by Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday that the Commonwealth would negotiate a plan with the states and territories to end up-front fees for students enrolling in VET diplomas or advanced diplomas.
The reforms, however, will not be in place for students enrolling in TAFE this year.
CIT currently has one of the highest intakes of students at diploma and associate degree level across Australia’s 56 public TAFEs – with more than 6000 enrolments last year.
Ms Gillard announced negotiations would begin on allowing students VET students to waive upfront fees and instead defer repayments until they were earning a wage – in the same way HECS works for university students.
Current fee levels at the CIT range between $1020 for international business and $3130 for hospitality and are regulated by the ACT Government.
The Federal Government would also guarantee foundation and entry-level courses for technical and service sector careers in areas such as health, business, hospitality, communications, construction, transport and other areas through a government-subsidised training place worth up to $7800.
CIT director Adrian Marron said the announcements were positive but ”the devil will be in the detail”.
While Victoria has been trialling income contingent loans to VET students, Mr Marron said ”there are lessons to be learned from the Victorian experience in relation to the mechanics of implementing the system”.
The CIT was aware that fees acted as a financial barrier to education and training for many students and already offered concessions such as 50 per cent off fees for students with a Centrelink card.
Mr Marron said the wide variety of courses, course lengths, fee structures and existing concessions would all need to be taken into account when constructing and negotiating the new HECS-style loans.
The Canberra Institute of Technology cautiously welcomed the announcement by Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday that the Commonwealth would negotiate a plan with the states and territories to end up-front fees for students enrolling in VET diplomas or advanced diplomas.
The reforms, however, will not be in place for students enrolling in TAFE this year.
CIT currently has one of the highest intakes of students at diploma and associate degree level across Australia’s 56 public TAFEs – with more than 6000 enrolments last year.
Ms Gillard announced negotiations would begin on allowing students VET students to waive upfront fees and instead defer repayments until they were earning a wage – in the same way HECS works for university students.
Current fee levels at the CIT range between $1020 for international business and $3130 for hospitality and are regulated by the ACT Government.
The Federal Government would also guarantee foundation and entry-level courses for technical and service sector careers in areas such as health, business, hospitality, communications, construction, transport and other areas through a government-subsidised training place worth up to $7800.
CIT director Adrian Marron said the announcements were positive but ”the devil will be in the detail”.
While Victoria has been trialling income contingent loans to VET students, Mr Marron said ”there are lessons to be learned from the Victorian experience in relation to the mechanics of implementing the system”.
The CIT was aware that fees acted as a financial barrier to education and training for many students and already offered concessions such as 50 per cent off fees for students with a Centrelink card.
Mr Marron said the wide variety of courses, course lengths, fee structures and existing concessions would all need to be taken into account when constructing and negotiating the new HECS-style loans.
ACT Education Minister Chris Bourke said he was happy to negotiate with the Commonwealth if the new measures went to improve local workforce productivity and participation.
”It is also worth noting that having federally funded HECS places aligns well with the University of Canberra-Institute of Technology joint venture,” he said, referring to the new institution to be set up by the UC and CIT to operate solely at diploma and associate degree level from 2013.
Mr Bourke said he looked forward to receiving more detail from the Commonwealth on how the scheme might work.
Ms Gillard said the reforms were aimed at tackling Australia’s skills shortage, recognised the increasing importance of higher level skills in Australian vocational education and take pressure off families struggling to make ends meet.
”By removing this cost barrier, students would have more choice about what and where they study, and would be free from the added burden of having to pay their training fees upfront,” she said.
She noted the Victorian trial had been popular, with 22,000 students opting to take up an income-contingent loan since 2009.
Ms Gillard said the package would not only open up a significant number of training opportunities for more Australians, but also improve job security and lift national productivity.
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”It is also worth noting that having federally funded HECS places aligns well with the University of Canberra-Institute of Technology joint venture,” he said, referring to the new institution to be set up by the UC and CIT to operate solely at diploma and associate degree level from 2013.
Mr Bourke said he looked forward to receiving more detail from the Commonwealth on how the scheme might work.
Ms Gillard said the reforms were aimed at tackling Australia’s skills shortage, recognised the increasing importance of higher level skills in Australian vocational education and take pressure off families struggling to make ends meet.
”By removing this cost barrier, students would have more choice about what and where they study, and would be free from the added burden of having to pay their training fees upfront,” she said.
She noted the Victorian trial had been popular, with 22,000 students opting to take up an income-contingent loan since 2009.
Ms Gillard said the package would not only open up a significant number of training opportunities for more Australians, but also improve job security and lift national productivity.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
2012年1月30日星期一
Crowd waiting for Pres. Obama to speak in Ann Arbor WITH SLIDESHOW
By Erica McClain
For the Press & Guide
For the Press & Guide
ANN ARBOR — As 3,000 people wait to hear from President Barack Obama at U of M’s Al Glick Fieldhouse, there are quite a few expectations from the crowd on education. “Hopefully, the government will help with socialized loans again, and the cost of education will be affordable for all,” said 28-year-old Cooley Law student Jason Andrews.
He added education is not a bubble.
“It should be affordable for meaningful people who have a desire to better themselves,” he said.
Andrews referenced Obama’s background as the son of an immigrant and how far he has been able to come.
“I just want my children to be able to afford that, too,” he said.
With Stafford loan rates set to double in July, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, due to the upcoming expiration of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, Andrews isn’t alone in his concern.
“For some it might be worth going to a private school, but for me, personally, I agree with lowering the rates because it doesn’t seem fair for someone to pay $25,000 per year for school,” U-M freshman Alec Lessner said.
U of M’s Office of Financial Aid estimates that a school year at the university as a fulltime freshman or sophomore costs $25,204 – with $12,634 making up tuition costs alone. Continued… Continued…
He added education is not a bubble.
“It should be affordable for meaningful people who have a desire to better themselves,” he said.
Andrews referenced Obama’s background as the son of an immigrant and how far he has been able to come.
“I just want my children to be able to afford that, too,” he said.
With Stafford loan rates set to double in July, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, due to the upcoming expiration of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, Andrews isn’t alone in his concern.
“For some it might be worth going to a private school, but for me, personally, I agree with lowering the rates because it doesn’t seem fair for someone to pay $25,000 per year for school,” U-M freshman Alec Lessner said.
U of M’s Office of Financial Aid estimates that a school year at the university as a fulltime freshman or sophomore costs $25,204 – with $12,634 making up tuition costs alone. Continued… Continued…
Ethan Fitzgerald, another U of M student, hoped the president would announce plans for a new program to aid college students with financial woes. Deleise Cole Wilson said she wanted to hear what Obama had to say for college students.
“I was impressed with what he had to say in the State of the Union,” Cole Wilson said.
Others, however, were just excited to have the chance to hear the president in person.
“I’ve been very supportive of the president, and I just wanted to see him in person,” said Ann Arbor resident Nancy Stoll.
“I was impressed with what he had to say in the State of the Union,” Cole Wilson said.
Others, however, were just excited to have the chance to hear the president in person.
“I’ve been very supportive of the president, and I just wanted to see him in person,” said Ann Arbor resident Nancy Stoll.
ANN ARBOR — As 3,000 people wait to hear from President Barack Obama at U of M’s Al Glick Fieldhouse, there are quite a few expectations from the crowd on education. “Hopefully, the government will help with socialized loans again, and the cost of education will be affordable for all,” said 28-year-old Cooley Law student Jason Andrews.
He added education is not a bubble.
“It should be affordable for meaningful people who have a desire to better themselves,” he said.
Andrews referenced Obama’s background as the son of an immigrant and how far he has been able to come.
“I just want my children to be able to afford that, too,” he said.
With Stafford loan rates set to double in July, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, due to the upcoming expiration of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, Andrews isn’t alone in his concern.
“For some it might be worth going to a private school, but for me, personally, I agree with lowering the rates because it doesn’t seem fair for someone to pay $25,000 per year for school,” U-M freshman Alec Lessner said.
U of M’s Office of Financial Aid estimates that a school year at the university as a fulltime freshman or sophomore costs $25,204 – with $12,634 making up tuition costs alone. Continued…
Ethan Fitzgerald, another U of M student, hoped the president would announce plans for a new program to aid college students with financial woes.
Deleise Cole Wilson said she wanted to hear what Obama had to say for college students.
“I was impressed with what he had to say in the State of the Union,” Cole Wilson said.
Others, however, were just excited to have the chance to hear the president in person.
“I’ve been very supportive of the president, and I just wanted to see him in person,” said Ann Arbor resident Nancy Stoll.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
He added education is not a bubble.
“It should be affordable for meaningful people who have a desire to better themselves,” he said.
Andrews referenced Obama’s background as the son of an immigrant and how far he has been able to come.
“I just want my children to be able to afford that, too,” he said.
With Stafford loan rates set to double in July, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, due to the upcoming expiration of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, Andrews isn’t alone in his concern.
“For some it might be worth going to a private school, but for me, personally, I agree with lowering the rates because it doesn’t seem fair for someone to pay $25,000 per year for school,” U-M freshman Alec Lessner said.
U of M’s Office of Financial Aid estimates that a school year at the university as a fulltime freshman or sophomore costs $25,204 – with $12,634 making up tuition costs alone. Continued…
Ethan Fitzgerald, another U of M student, hoped the president would announce plans for a new program to aid college students with financial woes.
Deleise Cole Wilson said she wanted to hear what Obama had to say for college students.
“I was impressed with what he had to say in the State of the Union,” Cole Wilson said.
Others, however, were just excited to have the chance to hear the president in person.
“I’ve been very supportive of the president, and I just wanted to see him in person,” said Ann Arbor resident Nancy Stoll.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
2012年1月23日星期一
Financial aid benefits all
More money in the pockets of the students means more for the city of Carbondale.
According to a university news release, 6,685 SIU Carbondale students received $23.2 million in federal financial aid and $170,000 in Parent Plus Loans. While that will be the bulk of the funds, according to the news release, more will come.
In fiscal year 2010 and 2011, more than $182.6 million was dolled out in undergraduate financial aid with more than $99 million in graduate stu-dent financial aid.
City Manager Kevin Baity said it is difficult to track exactly how much the city benefits because there are variables that include bursar bills, credit card debt, and rent and utilities owed. It is also difficult to track the benefits because sales tax revenues are recorded as monthly sales in quarterly increments. However, he said it’s probably safe to say that the $23.2 million will be beneficial.
“Of the $23.2 million, I would venture to say the university will retain a very large portion as payment towards the students’ bursar bills,” Baity said. “If the students were to actually receive 5 percent or $1.16 million, they may spend 20 percent or $232,000 in Carbondale. Based on that number, the city could realize up to $7,000 in retail sales tax, depending on what was purchased.”
According to SIU 42 percent of financial aid refunds were electronic direct deposits and the rest were through physical checks.
codell.rodriguez@thesouthern.com
http://tourism9.cm/ http://vkins.com/
According to a university news release, 6,685 SIU Carbondale students received $23.2 million in federal financial aid and $170,000 in Parent Plus Loans. While that will be the bulk of the funds, according to the news release, more will come.
In fiscal year 2010 and 2011, more than $182.6 million was dolled out in undergraduate financial aid with more than $99 million in graduate stu-dent financial aid.
City Manager Kevin Baity said it is difficult to track exactly how much the city benefits because there are variables that include bursar bills, credit card debt, and rent and utilities owed. It is also difficult to track the benefits because sales tax revenues are recorded as monthly sales in quarterly increments. However, he said it’s probably safe to say that the $23.2 million will be beneficial.
“Of the $23.2 million, I would venture to say the university will retain a very large portion as payment towards the students’ bursar bills,” Baity said. “If the students were to actually receive 5 percent or $1.16 million, they may spend 20 percent or $232,000 in Carbondale. Based on that number, the city could realize up to $7,000 in retail sales tax, depending on what was purchased.”
According to SIU 42 percent of financial aid refunds were electronic direct deposits and the rest were through physical checks.
codell.rodriguez@thesouthern.com
http://tourism9.cm/ http://vkins.com/
2012年1月20日星期五
Credit Suisse Toxic Bonuses Rival Stock, Gold With 75% Returns
January 20, 2012, 12:44 AM EST
By Bradley Keoun
Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) — The toxic-asset bonuses given to senior Credit Suisse Group AG bankers at the depths of the 2008 financial crisis are turning out to be almost as good as gold.
Credit Suisse employees who got $5.05 billion of junk-grade loans and commercial-mortgage-backed bonds in late 2008 as part of annual bonuses have reaped gains of 75 percent on the payouts since the end of that year through Nov. 30, people with knowledge of the results said. Gold futures returned 98 percent in the period, while Credit Suisse’s shares declined 23 percent.
The gains, which also beat the 4.8 percent return of two- year Treasuries, show how the rebound in debt markets from the lows of 2008 has sweetened the Zurich-based bank’s executive bonuses compared with the cash and stock bonuses rivals paid.
“It worked out in favor of the employees,” said Ann Rutledge, a former Moody’s Investors Service analyst who’s now a principal at R&R Consulting in New York, which rates mortgage bonds and other asset-backed securities. Looking back, “market valuations would have been at all-time lows” when the internal asset pool was set up.
The stock-beating performance may help explain why Credit Suisse employees were eager to invest in a $450 million pool of residential mortgage bonds the bank created last month. Credit Suisse loaned employees the money to buy shares in the fund, and demand was so great that the bank could only fill 90 percent of the orders, the people said.
Chief Executive Officer Brady Dougan, now 52, said in December 2008 that the decision to transfer the assets to staff would position the firm “well for 2009” and strike the “appropriate balance” between employees, who might otherwise have suffered steeper pay cuts, and shareholders, who would have borne the risks of further declines.
Stock Slide
The company, which posted a loss of 8.2 billion francs ($8.8 billion) for 2008, recovered the following year with a 6.72 billion-franc profit. Suzanne Fleming, a company spokeswoman, said the fund’s results are private.
The Partner Asset Facility, or PAF, as the internal employee fund is known, has maintained gains even as the European sovereign-debt crisis weighed on Credit Suisse’s stock price. The bank’s shares, which surged 80 percent in 2009, tumbled 26 percent in 2010 and 41 percent last year.
Shares in PAF were given to about 2,000 senior Credit Suisse employees as part of their 2008 year-end bonuses, people with knowledge of the plan have said. The employees were given $800 million of equity in the fund, with Credit Suisse providing $4.25 billion of loans to bolster the fund’s buying power, the people said.
Drop Before Gain
While the plan relieved shareholders of risks, the timing proved to be a windfall for the employees. The S&P/LSTA U.S. Leveraged Loan 100 Index, which tracks prices for loans to companies with junk-grade credit ratings, fell that month to a record low of 59 cents on the dollar.
Initially, the value of the PAF shares fell, people with knowledge of the results said. As of February 2009, the equity in the PAF held 90 percent of its initial value, they said.
Then markets recovered. By May 2011, the value had doubled over the original, before sliding to the 75 percent gain estimated as of November, the people said.
The leveraged-loan index traded at 92 cents as of Jan. 13.
It could have turned out worse for the employees, said Anthony Sanders, a former Deutsche Bank AG analyst who’s now a finance professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Had the prices for leveraged loans or commercial mortgage-backed securities, known as CMBS, continued to plunge, “they would have gotten absolutely annihilated,” he said.
Subject to Change
The ultimate value of the PAF fund, overseen by Credit Suisse Managing Director Jonathan McHardy, won’t be determined until 2016, one person said. For now, employees’ investments are locked up, and their final payouts may change.
As of Nov. 30, assets in the PAF had been reduced to $2.6 billion, as some of the bonds and loans were paid off or sold, the people said. The equity is now estimated by the fund’s administrators at $1.4 billion.
In December, as the ratio of debt to equity in the fund shrank to less than 1-to-1 from more than 5-to-1, Credit Suisse set up the second fund, known as Expanded PAF. The move allows Credit Suisse to rid itself of residential mortgage bonds, while giving the employees a chance to use borrowed money to increase returns on their total investment, the people said.
As with the original fund, assets were transferred to the new fund at their estimated market value, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The mortgage market may be ripe for improvement, Sanders said.
“If you take a look at the data, housing prices are starting to stabilize,” Sanders said. “You’re starting to see a slowdown in serious delinquencies. So it’s like the CMBS play, it’s probably a good time.”
–With reporting by Christine Harper, Jody Shenn and Daniel Kruger in New York and Elena Logutenkova in Zurich. Editors: Peter Eichenbaum, David Scheer
To contact the reporter on this story: Bradley Keoun in New York at bkeoun@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
By Bradley Keoun
Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) — The toxic-asset bonuses given to senior Credit Suisse Group AG bankers at the depths of the 2008 financial crisis are turning out to be almost as good as gold.
Credit Suisse employees who got $5.05 billion of junk-grade loans and commercial-mortgage-backed bonds in late 2008 as part of annual bonuses have reaped gains of 75 percent on the payouts since the end of that year through Nov. 30, people with knowledge of the results said. Gold futures returned 98 percent in the period, while Credit Suisse’s shares declined 23 percent.
The gains, which also beat the 4.8 percent return of two- year Treasuries, show how the rebound in debt markets from the lows of 2008 has sweetened the Zurich-based bank’s executive bonuses compared with the cash and stock bonuses rivals paid.
“It worked out in favor of the employees,” said Ann Rutledge, a former Moody’s Investors Service analyst who’s now a principal at R&R Consulting in New York, which rates mortgage bonds and other asset-backed securities. Looking back, “market valuations would have been at all-time lows” when the internal asset pool was set up.
The stock-beating performance may help explain why Credit Suisse employees were eager to invest in a $450 million pool of residential mortgage bonds the bank created last month. Credit Suisse loaned employees the money to buy shares in the fund, and demand was so great that the bank could only fill 90 percent of the orders, the people said.
Chief Executive Officer Brady Dougan, now 52, said in December 2008 that the decision to transfer the assets to staff would position the firm “well for 2009” and strike the “appropriate balance” between employees, who might otherwise have suffered steeper pay cuts, and shareholders, who would have borne the risks of further declines.
Stock Slide
The company, which posted a loss of 8.2 billion francs ($8.8 billion) for 2008, recovered the following year with a 6.72 billion-franc profit. Suzanne Fleming, a company spokeswoman, said the fund’s results are private.
The Partner Asset Facility, or PAF, as the internal employee fund is known, has maintained gains even as the European sovereign-debt crisis weighed on Credit Suisse’s stock price. The bank’s shares, which surged 80 percent in 2009, tumbled 26 percent in 2010 and 41 percent last year.
Shares in PAF were given to about 2,000 senior Credit Suisse employees as part of their 2008 year-end bonuses, people with knowledge of the plan have said. The employees were given $800 million of equity in the fund, with Credit Suisse providing $4.25 billion of loans to bolster the fund’s buying power, the people said.
Drop Before Gain
While the plan relieved shareholders of risks, the timing proved to be a windfall for the employees. The S&P/LSTA U.S. Leveraged Loan 100 Index, which tracks prices for loans to companies with junk-grade credit ratings, fell that month to a record low of 59 cents on the dollar.
Initially, the value of the PAF shares fell, people with knowledge of the results said. As of February 2009, the equity in the PAF held 90 percent of its initial value, they said.
Then markets recovered. By May 2011, the value had doubled over the original, before sliding to the 75 percent gain estimated as of November, the people said.
The leveraged-loan index traded at 92 cents as of Jan. 13.
It could have turned out worse for the employees, said Anthony Sanders, a former Deutsche Bank AG analyst who’s now a finance professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Had the prices for leveraged loans or commercial mortgage-backed securities, known as CMBS, continued to plunge, “they would have gotten absolutely annihilated,” he said.
Subject to Change
The ultimate value of the PAF fund, overseen by Credit Suisse Managing Director Jonathan McHardy, won’t be determined until 2016, one person said. For now, employees’ investments are locked up, and their final payouts may change.
As of Nov. 30, assets in the PAF had been reduced to $2.6 billion, as some of the bonds and loans were paid off or sold, the people said. The equity is now estimated by the fund’s administrators at $1.4 billion.
In December, as the ratio of debt to equity in the fund shrank to less than 1-to-1 from more than 5-to-1, Credit Suisse set up the second fund, known as Expanded PAF. The move allows Credit Suisse to rid itself of residential mortgage bonds, while giving the employees a chance to use borrowed money to increase returns on their total investment, the people said.
As with the original fund, assets were transferred to the new fund at their estimated market value, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The mortgage market may be ripe for improvement, Sanders said.
“If you take a look at the data, housing prices are starting to stabilize,” Sanders said. “You’re starting to see a slowdown in serious delinquencies. So it’s like the CMBS play, it’s probably a good time.”
–With reporting by Christine Harper, Jody Shenn and Daniel Kruger in New York and Elena Logutenkova in Zurich. Editors: Peter Eichenbaum, David Scheer
To contact the reporter on this story: Bradley Keoun in New York at bkeoun@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
Volunteers will help college bound students with financial aid applications on College Goal Sunday
GRAND RAPIDS – College bound students seeking free assistance with filling out the federal financial aid application, known as the FAFSA, should plan on attending the College Goal Sunday event in their area on Feb. 12.
“For many students and their families, college seems like an unachievable and unaffordable dream,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike Flanagan, about the statewide event. “College Goal Sunday locations have financial aid experts who can help families complete these complex applications and maximize financial assistance for students wanting to go to college.”
Last year, more than 1,600 students received assistance at College Goal Sunday events from volunteers. According to the state, statistics show that students who complete and submit FAFSA forms are more likely to go on to college.
The annual event is a collaborative effort of the state Department of Education, the Michigan Student Financial Aid Association, and EduGuide. The program was created to increase the number of students who continue education beyond high school and earn post-secondary degrees. The FAFSA is required of any student seeking financial aid including grants, loans, and many scholarships.
“It is critical that high school seniors and their parents are aware of these College Goal Sunday events,” said Bryan Taylor, president of EduGuide. “Students must complete and file a FAFSA in order to secure financial aid and should file by the March 1st priority date to ensure eligibility for federal and state programs.”
On Sunday, Feb. 12, student financial aid experts will be available to guide students and their parents through each step of completing and filing the free FAFSA. Students under age 23 are encouraged to attend with a parent or guardian. Parents and students should bring their completed 2011 Federal tax return (1040) if possible, or their W-2 and 1099 forms.
Dozens of sites across Michigan will be hosting College Goal Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m.including: Grand Valley State University Pew Campus Building A, located at 401 Fulton St.; Davenport University-Holland campus, 643 South Waverly Rd. and Newaygo County Regional Educational Service Agency, 4747 West 48th St. in Fremont; Loutit District Library, 407 Columbus Drive in Grand Haven and Western Michigan University
Schneider Hall – Business Court, 1903 W Michigan Ave. in Kalamazoo.
For a complete list of locations and additional information visit the website.
Prizes will be awarded during events, including a $1,000 scholarship, two $500 scholarships, and three $250 scholarships. Additional support for College Goal Sunday was provided by the C.S. Mott Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the DTE Energy Foundation.
Email: mscott@grpress.com and follow her on Twitter at Twitter.com/GRPScotty.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
“For many students and their families, college seems like an unachievable and unaffordable dream,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike Flanagan, about the statewide event. “College Goal Sunday locations have financial aid experts who can help families complete these complex applications and maximize financial assistance for students wanting to go to college.”
Last year, more than 1,600 students received assistance at College Goal Sunday events from volunteers. According to the state, statistics show that students who complete and submit FAFSA forms are more likely to go on to college.
The annual event is a collaborative effort of the state Department of Education, the Michigan Student Financial Aid Association, and EduGuide. The program was created to increase the number of students who continue education beyond high school and earn post-secondary degrees. The FAFSA is required of any student seeking financial aid including grants, loans, and many scholarships.
“It is critical that high school seniors and their parents are aware of these College Goal Sunday events,” said Bryan Taylor, president of EduGuide. “Students must complete and file a FAFSA in order to secure financial aid and should file by the March 1st priority date to ensure eligibility for federal and state programs.”
On Sunday, Feb. 12, student financial aid experts will be available to guide students and their parents through each step of completing and filing the free FAFSA. Students under age 23 are encouraged to attend with a parent or guardian. Parents and students should bring their completed 2011 Federal tax return (1040) if possible, or their W-2 and 1099 forms.
Dozens of sites across Michigan will be hosting College Goal Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m.including: Grand Valley State University Pew Campus Building A, located at 401 Fulton St.; Davenport University-Holland campus, 643 South Waverly Rd. and Newaygo County Regional Educational Service Agency, 4747 West 48th St. in Fremont; Loutit District Library, 407 Columbus Drive in Grand Haven and Western Michigan University
Schneider Hall – Business Court, 1903 W Michigan Ave. in Kalamazoo.
For a complete list of locations and additional information visit the website.
Prizes will be awarded during events, including a $1,000 scholarship, two $500 scholarships, and three $250 scholarships. Additional support for College Goal Sunday was provided by the C.S. Mott Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the DTE Energy Foundation.
Email: mscott@grpress.com and follow her on Twitter at Twitter.com/GRPScotty.
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
2012年1月19日星期四
Gold Investment Demand Grows Faster Than Jewelry And Tech Demand – Elizabeth Collins – Morningstar, Inc.
67 WALL STREET, New York – January 18, 2012 – The Wall Street Transcript has just published its Gold and Precious Metals Report offering a timely review of the sector to serious investors and industry executives. This special feature contains expert industry commentary through in-depth interviews with public company CEOs, Equity Analysts and Money Managers. The full issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.
Topics covered: Investment and Central Bank Demand – Dividends Dependent on Gold Prices – Gold Producers vs. Gold ETF – Midcap and Small-Cap Consolidation Activity
Companies include: Endeavour Silver (EXK); Alacer (ASR.TO); Apogee Silver (APE.V); Barrick (ABX); Eldorado (EGO); and many more.
In the following brief excerpt from the Gold And Precious Metals Report, expert analysts discuss the outlook for the sector and for investors.
Elizabeth Collins, CFA, is the Associate Director of equity research for the basic materials team at Morningstar, Inc. Her responsibilities include oversight of coverage for companies in the following industries: agriculture, chemicals, coal, engineering and construction, metals and mining, steel, wood products and building materials. Before becoming an Associate Director, Ms. Collins was a Senior Analyst on the energy team, where she had oversight for Morningstar’s coverage of oil services firms, oil and gas companies, and coal companies. She earned her MBA from DePaul University in March 2005 and holds a B.A. in psychology from Boston College.
TWST: Gold is still trading at a high price. Should it be at this point?
Ms. Collins: I think, in the current economic environment, it makes a lot of sense for gold to be at such a high price. In the third quarter of 2011, we saw a very high level of demand for gold. Jewelry demand for gold was actually down and demand from the technology sector was flat, but we saw demand from the investment community be very strong because of the strong performance of gold to date, as well as because of worries about macroeconomic uncertainty.
TWST: You mentioned jewelry demand was down. Does that reflect the general economic weakness around the world?
Ms. Collins: I think it can reflect economic weakness and it can also just be a result of some response to the high price of gold. So somebody who is going to purchase jewelry, say in India, is going into a shop and they go in with the intent to spend a certain amount of money on gold jewelry. When the price of gold goes up, it means that they’ll be buying fewer ounces, but they’ll be spending the same amount.
TWST: Is it because of that equation they are getting less for their investment dollar, or is it because in a weak economy people buy less jewelry?
Ms. Collins: The year-over-year decrease in gold jewelry demand, say from India, was 26% in volume terms. But in terms of the amount of money they put into jewelry, it was actually up about 2%. So they are spending more. They are spending a little bit more in money, but getting that much less in gold ounces because of the higher price.
TWST: How important is technology segment demand?
Ms. Collins: It’s small. Number one is jewelry, number two is investment – those are relatively close to each other. And technology is a much smaller part of overall demand for gold on a global basis.
TWST: Has that been the pattern in the industry?
Ms. Collins: It wouldn’t necessarily be different than in the past. But I guess this round we haven’t seen as much M&A activity yet. We’ve seen a few big purchases. But Barrick (ABX), for example, their most recent purchase wasn’t even a gold company – it was a copper company. I guess when people are talking about M And A activity being one candidate for closing the disconnect between gold miners and gold prices, it’s probably smaller companies that are hopeful, and they are hoping to see more M And A activity.
TWST: Given your kind of cautious outlook, what are you telling investors to do?
Ms. Collins: As a group, a lot of our gold miners are fairly valued. We have one company that we think is slightly undervalued, and we think it’s worth taking a closer look at, and that’s Yamana Gold (AUY) ticker AUY in the U.S. and YRI in Canada. And that’s a company with a portfolio of low-cost South American mines, and they have some very attractive growth projects in the pipeline. And we think that the market is not fully factoring in their future production growth when there are signs that they should be able to bring those mines on line. And we think Yamana is attractively valued. It’s not a deep discount at these levels, but we do think it’s attractively valued. Yamana is one of the few gold miners whose share prices have kept pace with bullion so far in 2011.
The Wall Street Transcript is a unique service for investors and industry researchers – providing fresh commentary and insight through verbatim interviews with CEOs and research analysts. This special issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.
The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse the views of any interviewees nor does it make stock recommendations.
For Information on subscribing to The Wall Street Transcript, please call 800/246-7673
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
Topics covered: Investment and Central Bank Demand – Dividends Dependent on Gold Prices – Gold Producers vs. Gold ETF – Midcap and Small-Cap Consolidation Activity
Companies include: Endeavour Silver (EXK); Alacer (ASR.TO); Apogee Silver (APE.V); Barrick (ABX); Eldorado (EGO); and many more.
In the following brief excerpt from the Gold And Precious Metals Report, expert analysts discuss the outlook for the sector and for investors.
Elizabeth Collins, CFA, is the Associate Director of equity research for the basic materials team at Morningstar, Inc. Her responsibilities include oversight of coverage for companies in the following industries: agriculture, chemicals, coal, engineering and construction, metals and mining, steel, wood products and building materials. Before becoming an Associate Director, Ms. Collins was a Senior Analyst on the energy team, where she had oversight for Morningstar’s coverage of oil services firms, oil and gas companies, and coal companies. She earned her MBA from DePaul University in March 2005 and holds a B.A. in psychology from Boston College.
TWST: Gold is still trading at a high price. Should it be at this point?
Ms. Collins: I think, in the current economic environment, it makes a lot of sense for gold to be at such a high price. In the third quarter of 2011, we saw a very high level of demand for gold. Jewelry demand for gold was actually down and demand from the technology sector was flat, but we saw demand from the investment community be very strong because of the strong performance of gold to date, as well as because of worries about macroeconomic uncertainty.
TWST: You mentioned jewelry demand was down. Does that reflect the general economic weakness around the world?
Ms. Collins: I think it can reflect economic weakness and it can also just be a result of some response to the high price of gold. So somebody who is going to purchase jewelry, say in India, is going into a shop and they go in with the intent to spend a certain amount of money on gold jewelry. When the price of gold goes up, it means that they’ll be buying fewer ounces, but they’ll be spending the same amount.
TWST: Is it because of that equation they are getting less for their investment dollar, or is it because in a weak economy people buy less jewelry?
Ms. Collins: The year-over-year decrease in gold jewelry demand, say from India, was 26% in volume terms. But in terms of the amount of money they put into jewelry, it was actually up about 2%. So they are spending more. They are spending a little bit more in money, but getting that much less in gold ounces because of the higher price.
TWST: How important is technology segment demand?
Ms. Collins: It’s small. Number one is jewelry, number two is investment – those are relatively close to each other. And technology is a much smaller part of overall demand for gold on a global basis.
TWST: Has that been the pattern in the industry?
Ms. Collins: It wouldn’t necessarily be different than in the past. But I guess this round we haven’t seen as much M&A activity yet. We’ve seen a few big purchases. But Barrick (ABX), for example, their most recent purchase wasn’t even a gold company – it was a copper company. I guess when people are talking about M And A activity being one candidate for closing the disconnect between gold miners and gold prices, it’s probably smaller companies that are hopeful, and they are hoping to see more M And A activity.
TWST: Given your kind of cautious outlook, what are you telling investors to do?
Ms. Collins: As a group, a lot of our gold miners are fairly valued. We have one company that we think is slightly undervalued, and we think it’s worth taking a closer look at, and that’s Yamana Gold (AUY) ticker AUY in the U.S. and YRI in Canada. And that’s a company with a portfolio of low-cost South American mines, and they have some very attractive growth projects in the pipeline. And we think that the market is not fully factoring in their future production growth when there are signs that they should be able to bring those mines on line. And we think Yamana is attractively valued. It’s not a deep discount at these levels, but we do think it’s attractively valued. Yamana is one of the few gold miners whose share prices have kept pace with bullion so far in 2011.
The Wall Street Transcript is a unique service for investors and industry researchers – providing fresh commentary and insight through verbatim interviews with CEOs and research analysts. This special issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.
The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse the views of any interviewees nor does it make stock recommendations.
For Information on subscribing to The Wall Street Transcript, please call 800/246-7673
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
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