Longtime readers of Liberty Blitzkrieg will know that I think the greatest parody of Wall Street ever created is courtesy of SNL about a made-up firm called Global Century Investments. Before I provide a link to the video, I want to highlight a stunning quote from Gretchen Morgenson’s excellent New York Times article detailing the extraordinarily shady relationships between private equity firms and public pension funds. The quote comes in at the end of the article:
Kristi Huller, a spokeswoman for K.K.R., initially denied that it could reduce or eliminate its fiduciary duties. But after being presented with an excerpt from the agreement, she acknowledged that its language allowed “a modification of our fiduciary duties.”
What K.R.R. spokeswoman Kristi Huller does is straight up lie about the firm’s fiduciary duties, only to backtrack once she realizes she has been caught.
That is exactly what happens at the end of the SNL spoof. Yes it’s official, Wall Street has become a literal parody of itself.
Watch the video here and compare it to the quote above. Remarkable.
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David Sirota must be commended for his incredible work this year exposing the insidious relationship between public pension funds and “alternative asset managers,” namely private equity firms and hedge funds. It is the private equity component that has captured my attention the most due to the industry’s notoriously opaque and seemingly illegal fees.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an article highlighting the surge in what it calls “ultralong” bonds, defined as having a maturity of more than 30 years. The findings are simply stunning. In what may seem counterintuitive, bond yields at hundred year plus lows in many countries has led major investment firms to rush into ever riskier and longer duration fixed income securities just to earn some income. This has opened the floodgates to governments and corporations looking to lock in low yields on debt they won’t have to pay back for a generation.