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Comment by avs733 | Hacker News Reader

It seems like it would be an all around benefit to the economy to disrupt the model that hedge funds use to invest in companies. Obviously access to capital is important. Obviously there are companies that benefit from more efficient operations (e.g., the Olive Garden drama of years past...BREADSTICKS). However, I cannot seem to find any benefit in allowing a hedge fund to charge for services to a company it has taken over. To buy a company with the pure goal of extracting any short term value with the intent of destroying it seems to be a long term societal ill that should be regulated out of existence.

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> Olive Garden drama of years past

Ahh, Olive Garden. I hope you won't mind a slight tangent involving Olive Garden, one of Paul Graham's essays, and a sneaky business deal:

In one of his essays[1], Paul Graham wrote, "I think most businesses that fail do it because they don't give customers what they want. Look at restaurants. A large percentage fail, about a quarter in the first year. But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?"

Yes, I can name a restaurant that had really good food and went out of business -- it was all of the Olive Garden locations in Ontario, Canada, about 15 years ago. They were always busy, always had a line-up to get in, and pretty much everyone I knew liked the food a lot. Then suddenly, without explanation, all of the Olive Gardens in Ontario shut down.

Much later I learned that Olive Garden USA had shifted some large debts to its Olive Garden Canada subsidiary, and allowed the Canadian subsidiary to go bankrupt, freeing the parent corporation of the debts. (So businesses fail for odd reasons even when they have excellent products and masses of loyal customers.)

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

In that case I would suggest that Olive Garden Canada didn't "go out of business" (i.e. naturally through business dying off), but was killed intentionally.

It didn't die as a result of failure on its own part.

There is also a difference between a restaurant and a chain of restaurants - in any case the US component survived, so I would say that the (overall) business didn't "die off".

> I learned that Olive Garden USA had shifted some large debts to its Olive Garden Canada subsidiary, and allowed the Canadian subsidiary to go bankrupt, freeing the parent corporation of the debts.

How does shit like that even work? It seems like it would clearly qualify under fraud. Even if it doesn't, how does it not send every potential future creditor running away as fast as possible?

Doesn't sound like fraud. If you rack up a bunch of debt, but take out a mortgage on your already paid off house to get rid of the debt, is it fraud?

You had a perfectly good house, but sometimes decisions have to be made.

Your creditor point is valid, but only if the creditors are paying deep attention because if they're not, these actions could give the appearance of profitability and stability.

> If you rack up a bunch of debt, but take out a mortgage on your already paid off house to get rid of the debt, is it fraud?

That isn't what was described, to my understanding. What was described seems sort of like transferring all your unsecured debt to your spouse, and letting her go through some individual bankruptcy that doesn't affect you.

> You had a perfectly good house, but sometimes decisions have to be made.

If you're allowed to transfer debt around to related entities where negative repercussions don't affect you, the normal checks and balances of the system have failed.

I imagine a similar situation (even if not purposefully attempted) is why student loans are actually protected from bankruptcy. Parents used to pay for college, because students couldn't really afford it. Parents don't necessarily want to go into bankruptcy because they may have other assets affected. If the students take out the loan, if they go into bankruptcy in the few years after graduating, the parents aren't affected. Students are a risky bet because bankruptcy has fairly little cost for them that early in life, so the loans would be very hard to get. To incentivize lenders to give the loans, you have to protect them.

"Look at restaurants. A large percentage fail, about a quarter in the first year. But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?"

Yes. In fact I know a shitload of restaurants with excellent food, that went out of business. In the restaurant business your are more in the real estate business than in the food business. Location, Location, Location is everything. And how much you pay for it.

Yeah that bothered me immensely. It is an assumption of 'rational' market/consumer behavior that is extremely and inaccurately reductive.

> Yes, I can name a restaurant that had really good food and went out of business

lol. That's not how it works. The business was successful. Certainly, if you put it intentionally under fire it is going to go under.

There are infinite ways to bankrupt successful businesses. The most common I saw/experienced was family businesses where the heirs could not agree to the terms and kept fighting.

Plenty of restaurants go broke, despite serving good food. Just like plenty of restaurant make profits despite selling bad food.

Sounds like pg has never owned or run a restaurant. Producing good food is much riskier than producing microwaved slop.

Lots of companies with lots of value are dead or irreversibly dying (that is, saving them would cost more than the entire value of the saved company).

There's nothing wrong or strange about firms specializing in extracting what can be salvaged out of the these. It's not more short-term or long-term specific than any other decision owners make about companies -- carving out viable business units that can be spun off and sold is a fundamentally long-term proposition (for the buyer and society). It's not all Michael Douglas defrauding overfunded pensions.

No, but a non-zero proportion of them contribute to the death of the company (for example by saddling struggling companies with debt in LBO deals).

That is often because the turnaround failed, not because it was planned.

I assume you're trying to make the point that they are well-intentioned when they decide to saddle the company with debt because it's part of a turnaround effort. Empirically, that is not categorically true.

I assume you don't know what you're talking about, because taking on debt isn't inherently ill-intentioned.

You've also missed the point. I'm not saying it's categorically I'll-intentioned, but it certainly is not categorically well-intentioned either.

It is most certainly well-intentioned. Managers take on debt with the intention of creating, not destroying value.

If you read about some of the more spectacular company collapses involving debt in LBO deals you will find that is not even close to being universally true.

Investors in those LBOs aren't better off with the collapse of those companies. Even sophisticated investors sometimes make terrible judgement calls. Failure was not their objective.

The notion that that investors don't want their investments to spectacularly fail should really be self-evident.

Taking on debt isn't necessarily value-destructive, otherwise companies would prefer to run debt-free.

As any corporate finance book will teach you, increasing leverage simply means returns to equity holders are more volatile.

It's like adding debt to a lemonade stand that generates $1 a day everyday for the chance of instead generating $5 or ($5) everyday.

People (managers, investors..) have varying appetites for risk, but at the end of the day, these are all consenting adults and they can do as they please within the limits of the law.

I understand how debt works and I never said it was necessarily value-destructive. I gave it as one example of something in LBO deals that can be.

> As any corporate finance book will teach you, increasing leverage simply means returns to equity holders are more volatile

English translation: Leverage reduces equity value.

> Leverage reduces equity value

Not at all:

  Equity = Assets - Liabilities

Borrowing money adds an equal amount to Assets and Liabilities. The difference remains the same.

Wait, was the concept of interest abolished while I wasn't looking?

Accrued interested is added to the Liability as time goes on, but it is not there on Day 0. Furthermore, businesses borrow money in order to use it to increase assets, not just sit in a pile.

> but it is not there on Day 0.

I'm pretty sure there are loans where it is, or at least a portion of it is, or at a bare minimum there's an early repayment fee. It would not surprise me to learn that in the world of business finance, these happen. It also wouldn't surprise me to learn that these are used creatively to shift money between entities.

I've borrowed plenty of money in business without such fees, and I'm a pipsqueak nobody.

I didn't mean to imply these loans were the norm, just that I believe they exist, while your prior comment seemed to imply they did not.

The interest can be treated as finance cost, and amortized over time.

Rather than going straight on the balance sheet, it goes on the income statements (which are change in balance sheet) a little bit each statement period.

This makes the company's performance look less spiky, making it easier to reason about (from a pure profit/loss perspective, not a cashflow one) and less scary to shareholders.

It also matches with the way the rest of the balance sheet is reported (current value). For example: if you have some aspect of the business which you believe will appreciate in value over time, you probably shouldn't immediately book the increase at the as-yet unrealized future value.

It didn't, but companies don't issue debt just to have it sit on their balance sheet. Presumably, the additional capital is put to use in projects with an expected return that is greater than the cost of capital (usually the weighted average between (i) the equity holder's required return on equity and (ii) the cost of debt that is usually expressed in the form of the interest rate, to keep it simple).

Taking on debt is always done with the purpose of creating value. Sometimes it fails, but that doesn't mean failure was the objective.

LBOs aren't evil.

I know what you're saying, but I think it's easier to conceptualize if you write the equation:

Assets = Liabilities + Equity

The other way lends credence to the thought that an increase in liabilities requires a decrease in equity. Without knowing how journaling works, I think such an error would actually be quite logical.

It's still an error.

What would you think of a person who confidently made erroneous assertions about the relationship between Volts and Amperes?

As V=IR is the most basic equation in electricity, A=L+E is the most basic equation in business. It's necessary to understand them in order to pontificate about them, instead of just making things up.

All things remaining equal, yes that’s the accounting 101 definition.

When you’re talking private equity LBO activity, all things are not equal.

There are lots of companies that prefer to run debt-free and that doesn't mean they are run wrongly.

Even if they are net debt free, they often run a line of credit to even out the bumps between when money is received and when it must be disbursed (such as for payroll).

Your parent comment did not make that claim

It claimed that companies do not prefer to run debt-free. Many do prefer that. Then I added a secondary claim of myself.

> Many do prefer that.

No, they don't, unless they're small companies who are very risk-averse perhaps. I'd wager there isn't a single debt-free company in the Russell 2000 index.

That's restricting the definition of company a lot. (Note that I'm not saying that most companies run debt-free, just that it's a somewhat significant percentage, almost certainly double-digit. Probably mostly smallish companies indeed. Mostly single-owner or family-owned I guess. And, as a nearby comment said, almost all will take on temporary debt to smooth operations when needed. I worked for one with about 80 employees, but not in the financial department.)

If that was the primary reason for a company to take on debt, wouldn't it be preferable to instead run the company debt-free and let the equity holders leverage themselves to their desired risk level by taking on debt themselves?

That's a valid question, but at least two reasons come to mind which would explain why investors leverage the company instead.

Taxes are paid after interest, so leverage effectively creates a "tax shield" that can be very advantageous.

Even if that weren't the case, equity holders have limited liability. They are only liable up to the amount they invested. Naturally, their incentives are usually aligned with that of lenders, since nobody is better off in the event the company goes under.

But very risk-tolerant investors indeed take on leverage themselves, often in the form of what is called margin trading. It can bring outsized returns, but those investors are also potentially liable for more than they invested.

First, "non-zero" is an extremely high bar, especially for mere "contribution". Knowing that there is non-zero contribution tells us nothing about whether it's a problem we should care about.

Second, there is massive survivorship bias (well, actually the literal opposite, I suppose) going on here. There is a massive bias towards hearing about the deals that go bad. There is little effort to chronicle the times this worked out well, and a LBO saved a sick company.

Companies need to be able to die, and extracting as much value from the dying company is worthwhile. The alternative is to let a company waste away, slowly bleeding out the last of their resources until their is nothing left. That is not good for the economy, and only prolongs the inevitable. This might feel morbid, but it shouldn't; companies aren't people.

Obviously the people at the company need to be taken care of, but that is a larger societal issue about how we deal with people who lose their jobs in general, not about companies that go out of business.

If the people making the largest bid for a company want to close it down, then that is probably the best thing to do; if it was really worth it to turn the business around, then someone else would offer more money to keep it going (or at least the same amount).

> If the people making the largest bid for a company want to close it down, then that is probably the best thing to do; if it was really worth it to turn the business around, then someone else would offer more money to keep it going (or at least the same amount).

Do you really think this?

What if hedge funds just happen to get larger than anyone else in the spaces they operate in, precisely by executing this technique, such that there's no "someone else" who would offer more money?

An analogy: you're essentially saying that it's "the best thing to do" to date a vampire and let them suck out all your blood, because if there were a better partner for you to date than a vampire, surely such a partner would be more attractive than the vampire is, and would try harder to date you than the vampire is.

Now that doesn't sound right, does it? These vampire[-corporations] are supernaturally attractive [to shareholders] and are driven by their bloodlust to seduce people [i.e. board-members] far more effectively than regular human[-corporations] can manage.

> What if hedge funds just happen to get larger than anyone else in the spaces they operate in, precisely by executing this technique, such that there's no "someone else" who would offer more money?

Companies buy companies all the time. Hedge funds, in the grand scheme of things, are not that incredibly large compared to other companies. Also, companies making acquisitions have effectively unlimited funds to do so by taking out loans in order to buy companies. They can also buy companies without even exchanging money by converting stock in a larger ratio, effectively inflating the company's value in order to buy it. So what you're saying doesn't make sense.

> An analogy: you're essentially saying that it's "the best thing to do" to date a vampire and let them suck out all your blood, because if there were a better partner for you to date than a vampire, surely such a partner would be more attractive than the vampire is, and would try harder to date you than the vampire is.

Companies aren't people. If the board of investors wants to sell to a vampire it means that they're actually gaining the most value by selling to that vampire themselves. People need to stop looking at companies as monolithic wholes and actually as the sum intentions of the owners of the companies, the investors.

> People need to stop looking at companies as monolithic wholes and actually as the sum intentions of the owners of the companies, the investors.

This was my point. A vampire, mythologically, can compel a human to obey it: despite the human realizing that it'd really be a dumb idea to let something suck out all of your blood, it's still just really hard to resist letting the vampire do that. There is, I suppose, what might in modern language be called a "superstimulus"—something which causes some part of your brain to override the rest, despite the rest of the brain screaming "no."

Likewise, these hedge funds offer the ultimate opportunity to make a change that is good for investors at the expense of employees. The investors are the part of the brain that is compelled; the employees are the rest of the brain, screaming "no."

I've never heard of a co-op agreeing to be acquired by a hedge fund; have you?

> This was my point. A vampire, mythologically, can compel a human to obey it: despite the human realizing that it'd really be a dumb idea to let something suck out all of your blood, it's still just really hard to resist letting the vampire do that. There is, I suppose, what might in modern language be called a "superstimulus"—something which causes some part of your brain to override the rest, despite the rest of the brain screaming "no." You're viewing this as somehow negative. The investors gain by selling, they don't lose. There is no "sucking of blood" that occurs.

> Likewise, these hedge funds offer the ultimate opportunity to make a change that is good for investors at the expense of employees.

Employees are often part shareholders at these companies. They gain as well.

> I've never heard of a co-op agreeing to be acquired by a hedge fund; have you?

Try a google search, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41344946

Just found out about the co-op group in the UK from reading this article. It seems like they are a member based co-op vs. an employee owned one and it looks like they were shedding their banking division to isolate the loss from the whole financial collapse. It does seem like employee owned companies would do more to preserve their jobs vs. scrap the business for short term profit. So while one could argue that some sort of reform of this would help buffer the pain being inflicted on employees moving towards more egalitarian models of ownership would seem to be a better goal in the long run.

> Likewise, these hedge funds offer the ultimate opportunity to make a change that is good for investors at the expense of employees.

That is true with or without hedge funds. Investors will always take actions that benefit themselves, no matter the cost to employees. Employees will always only benefit when that is a by-product of the investors benefiting.

Protecting employees is something that is important, but preventing hedge funds from buying companies is not how you protect them.

The validity of your last sentence depends on what hedge funds are, I think. My understanding is that these days the defining characteristic of hedge funds, as opposed to mutual funds, is the lack of regulation. In that case, I suggest things could be different without hedge funds, or with a different set of regulations for them.

It may not involve hedge funds per se, but you made me think of the saga of Diamond Foods. It was founded as a co-op in 1912, became a public company in 2005, and rapidly pursued growth at any cost, until an accounting scandal brought them back to earth in 2012.

It's a depressing story about how doing something well year after year isn't good enough, so someone is found to strap rocket engines on and shoot for the moon, in an effort to please investors, and it turns out to be a fraud (litigation over which is still ongoing). The end result was a merger into Snyders-Lance.

This resonates with me, because Diamond brand shelled walnuts are what I always used for baking, but when they were pursuing growth they were expanding into snacks, and I presume their current owner is primarily concerned with that market.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Foods

I mean, the vampire is paying you...so it's really more like selling plasma or organs or something.

The analogy falls apart completely unless you attribute some inherent value to a corporation's existence like you would to human life.

What value does a corporation have beyond the economic value that it produces?

A good corporation is a bunch of gelled teams who are at home with one-another and enjoy working together. Destroying the corporation usually results in the dissolution of the component teams, one way or another.

That's the real loss—not just in terms of human happiness, but also in terms of per-capita economic productivity. It's like rewriting software: by starting from scratch, even with the same libraries, you're throwing away all the hard-fought knowledge of the optimal arrangements of, and interactions between, those components.

And, since people find their own optimal arrangements/interactions over time, rather than being placed into such arrangements by some sort of "org-chart architect", there's no one with a top-down view who can salvage the most useful arrangements/interactions at the destination.

A hedge fund might take a particular gelled team and sell them off "as a unit" to some company; but what that company will be getting is a box of lego with no instruction manual for how it goes together.

> A good corporation is a bunch of gelled teams who are at home with one-another and enjoy working together. Destroying the corporation usually results in the dissolution of the component teams, one way or another.

A gelled team that works well together making obsolete copiers or film cameras is a waste of resources.

That's correct. When a company's assets are worth more than the company as a business, it is appropriate to reallocate those assets to something more productive.

No, it's not. Virtually every startup has assets (i.e. employees) worth more than company business (i.e. zero revenue). It is super important to distinguish between dieng company vs sick company vs growing company. If there was someone who killed every human for their teeth and bones when they fail to be productive because of sickness , you won't consider that as wise business choice.

The investors certainly believe the company is worth more than the money they are investing, or they wouldn't invest. (Revenue isn't how a business is valued anyway, even in a mature business.) A startup's value is based on future anticipated ROI.

My point stands.

Yes, the GP is right and I think you are talking at cross purposes. In finance, employees are not considered assets and companies with no revenue are not necessarily considered to have no value.

to use an analogy...

What is the difference between a natural death, physician assisted suicide, a government sanctioned execution, manslaughter, and murder?

Companies should die off from competitive pressures. It is hard to build a company and many thousands of people rely on a company like Xerox for their welfare. I think there is a problem with the wanton destruction of companies so that a small group can take dicerolls on whether or not capital can pay down debt over the short to medium term. I'm all for activist investors, but Icahn has always been more of a vulture. His self dealing in the TWA fiasco was particularly egregious.

For those curious what "Olive Garden drama of years past" is, I believe it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Garden#Activist_investor...

Thanks...that was an unfortunately opaque and self-important way of phrasing that reference.

> The chain also had stopped the common practice of adding salt to the water in which it cooked its pasta in order to secure longer warranties on the pots, which had Smith incredulous

Oh boy.

> I cannot seem to find any benefit in allowing a hedge fund to charge for services to a company it has taken over

They could just as easily cause the company to borrow from the fund or pay it a dividend. Ownership means control over how its assets are spent. (That said, one could encourage pay-outs via one way over another by tweaking the tax code.)

I mean legally you are right...but I wasn't saying it is illegal. I was saying it should be illegal.

I can't imagine this is as common in Germany with employee elected board members.

How do you draw that line, though? Say I start a business and own it 100%. Should I be allowed to pay myself? What if I'm already a billionaire? What if I buy it instead of start it? What if it's a few friends + me instead of solo?

I would suggest that a couple places to start would be eliminating things that are purely about value transfer and extraction.

1) Not allowing a purchaser to transfer debt from that purchase to the newly purchased entity.

2) Not allowing a company to pay fees for service to any corporate entity that has a conflict with a board member. The board members get paid to give advice...

Yes I'm aware these are imperfect solution, yes there are loopholes, yes these things rarely work...but those two practices seem to be particularly rife for abuse.

#1 is not unique to corporate acquisitions. Think of it like a real estate mortgage. You can buy an apartment complex with 25% down and finance the other 75% as long as the building produces 1.25x the debt payment in free cashflow. The key is having enough cushion in the cahsflow to account for value-add "repairs" like remodeling stores or launching a new product to maintain/grow cashflow.

If an LBO is done properly, like Michael's, it's a win for everyone. Old shareholders don't lose their shirt due to an unsustainable valuation tanking, lenders get paid back, and new shareholders aren't tied to the same old valuation because they financed the acquisition and only invested a percentage of the sale price. The trick is identifying which poorly-performing companies are just overvalued and can be transformed into strong performers at a different price-point, and which companies are just headed for the gutters.

You seem to be implying that raising questions about how we do things is silly because regulation would be overwhelmingly complicated and infeasible.

However, if it's a public company, (which is just one possible abstract entity) then there are all sorts of rules and complications when there are one or more large investors.* Given these rules and regulations exist, it's not unreasonable to consider whether they should be changed slightly in pursuit of the public good.

*I'm thinking of stuff I've read about CBS v. Redstone in Matt Levine's column, where the board of CBS was trying to get rid of its controlling shareholder. They seem to have failed, but it was a fight.

Your parent argues that you probably can't make this illegal without fundamentally changing what it even means to own something.

This is actually a very analogous situation to DRM/right to repair etc: when you've bought a device, you (should) have the right to do whatever you want with it, take it apart, modify it, use it in unintended ways and even destroy it. The seller should not have any legal rights to curtail any of these actions.

The same principles applies to buying a company.

> It seems like it would be an all around benefit to the economy to disrupt the model that hedge funds use to invest in companies

I think you maybe don't quite know exactly what a hedge fund is and what purpose it serves. Moreover, leveraged buyouts are more a tool of private equity firms.

There's some overlap, but you should probably get your basic terms right before you start suggesting new regulation.

It seems to me, the Blackstone Fund is single handedly causing massive short term societal ills in housing & rental price inflation.

Why? It seems to me that Blackstone was buying up homes when no one else was. They took a risk and it paid off.

The investment bankers created the mess & more(same?) investment bankers picked up the crumbs & now plan on making upwards of 400% markups on over-priced properties. This is the exact reason why Glass-Steagal was instituted, to keep investment & commercial bankers seperate. They've robbed the world's wealth twice now & are currently still going strong. Wage slaves be damned, perhaps they can get 60 year mortgages to afford housing, right?

It is true that LBOs can injure companies - like what happened to Toys'R'Us bankruptcy after the Bain Cap & KKR buyout.

It is especially dangerous in times of inflated multiples like we are seeing these days, where PE valuations are kind of bubbling. The demand for M&A transactions is so much bigger than the supply that prices growth quicker than the underlying business value - making it usually harder to justify through profitability improvements.

Yet the whole PE process does bring benefits to the underlying industries is buys, especially by providing investment capacities to businesses that usually don't have enough, and also by professionalization and by introducing sophisticated management standards to the companies (eg. in terms of strategic thinking, reporting, optimization, pricing, etc.).

"To buy a company with the pure goal of extracting any short term value with the intent of destroying it seems to be a long term societal ill that should be regulated out of existence."

Why? The company would not have been bought otherwise, apparently. The company had issues obviously. The buy felt there was value to be extracted just not by continuing the operations. So what.

> To buy a company with the pure goal of extracting any short term value with the intent of destroying it seems to be a long term societal ill that should be regulated out of existence.

If a company is on its last legs, what is wrong with extracting money from it before killing it? Trying to keep dead-companies-walking afloat would be even worse.

Why? Should adults be allowed to make decisions about their own company? Nobody is actually forced to sell. And if you own something, isn’t it yours?

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