Steve Roth — The Global “Capital” Glut

What Bain capital has to say about the global capital glut.

So what about Bain Capital, Romney’s shop? Here from their December 10, 2012 report (PDF; hat tip to the always-remarkable Izabella Kaminska, and to Climateer Investing).

World awash in nearly one quadrillion of cheap capital by end of decade, according to new Bain & Company report
Their takeaways include:

The capital glut will be accompanied by persistently low real interest rates, high volatility and thin real rates of return. 

Sound like secular stagnation to you?

 Also:

The ever-present danger of asset inflation will contribute to an overall steepening of the investment risk curve… companies will need to strengthen their bubble-detection capabilities

In short, there’s a huge amount of money floating around out there relative to income and production. (In Steve World, all financial assets embody money, and the money stock is the total value of financial assets — including dollar bills, deeds, or other formal financial claims — regardless of how currency-like those things are. Equating currency and currency-like things with money is conceptually incoherent.)

This is an excerpt. If this is your interest, read the whole thing and follow the link at the end.

Hint: it’s about what the herd does with all that money.

Asymptosis
The Global “Capital” Glut

Steve Roth

Thom Hartmann — The Bankruptcy and Privatization of Detroit Is a Terrifying Preview of What Republicans Want to Do to the Rest of the Country

The Bain Capitalization of Detroit, perfected by Michigan "favorite son" Mitt Romney — load it up with debt, extract cash, and then sell it off piece by piece — just as the core is doing with the periphery in the EZ. Hey, "that's just capitalism" (read neoliberalism).

AlterNet
The Bankruptcy and Privatization of Detroit Is a Terrifying Preview of What Republicans Want to Do to the Rest of the Country

Thom Hartmann

Flawed, Ignorant and Dangerous

“At base, having a small elite with vast wealth is good for the poor and the middle class.”

A Bain Capital Partner’s Worldview - Ed Conard interview

How do you open dialogue with a sociopath?  IS there much common ground?  When is it worth looking for overlap with an electron microscope?  No component in a complex system can fully comprehend OR RANK the options available to the complex aggregate - any more than any given neuron can express the group intelligence of the human CNS.  But they can get some idea, with enough compromise & interaction.

At some point, chicks with dominant balances have to throw out bullies who are deaf, dumb & blind to aggregate options, no matter their personal attributes.  No attribute of a system component has scalable meaning sans the operational ability to coordinate within the aggregate.  In other settings, we lament extreme personal success & group failure as "cancer."

“A lot of people don’t realize that what happened in 2008 was nearly identical to what happened in 1929,” he says. “Depositors ran to the bank to withdraw their money only to discover, like the citizens of Bedford Falls” — referring to the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “that there was no money in the vault. All that money had been lent.” 

Is this grossly ignorant, or contemptibly slick treason?  Given enough time, the two always converge.   He next argues for guaranteed "bank" bailouts, regardless of how or why they fail - while not bothering to discriminate between commercial banks, investment banks & hedge funds.

The biggest flaw I sense in Ed Conard's "mathematical" approach to so many emerging unknowns, is his assumed predictive power.  There's always a lot of math that is exquisitely & laboriously applied to flawed concepts.

Diverse talents emerge unpredictably from massively recombinant sexual reproduction - as his own, humble beginnings in a Detroit suburb show. Only known way to parse that talent - so far - is, as the Marine Corp says, to generate both quality & pace of decision-making by distributing decision-making.  Since decision-making so often means denominating transactions with fiat currency, an economy with options thereby adapts best by distributing  group income in a way that is optimally adaptive, so that talent & local options always meet, ASAP. There's no set theory explaining how "optimal" evolves over time - just that it must adapt quickly to unpredictable, aggregate context.   Income disparity means not giving emerging talent enough income to buy what it is capable of consuming, or inventing.

I wonder how he feels about estate taxes.  What if his own kids have no talent or drive whatsoever?