Toys R Us, whose private equity owners borrowed more than $5 billion to buy the company (with a $400 million annual debt service plan).
How is it these crooks get to transfer that purchase debt to the very company they are purchasing?
This ought to be illegal, and the sooner it is the better off we’ll all be. These fuckers contribute nothing to the economy, but suck viable businesses dry through fiscal shenanigans.
That’s not a problem at all, actually - it’s kind of necessary for individual owners and small businesses to do so in order to have profit/loss calculations work out.
The real issue is that VC firms can use corporate structuring and subholdings to completely negate the parent company/investors from all debts and financial responsibilities of the subheld companies. When TRU went bankrupt, the VC firm that raided the treasury should have been on the hook for all its debts, and the owners/operators of the VC firm should be on the hook for the VC’s debts.
If you want change you need to hound these people where they live. Protest in Nantucket. Tahoe. Aspen. They live in a cloistered world and until they’re hounded and shamed they’re immorality will continue. They will say the business model was broken, that’s a lie, the executives are uncreative vampires with 3 viable years to cash out. They will keep sucking until “we the people” make this kind of behavior unliveable. But the reality - boingboing reader - is you are part of it as you code, fawn at conferences, strategic plan and by and large abet this canabalism
BB readers are, by and large, against the Republican greed-is-good mentality - which is the mentality that cripples watchdog agencies and laws that would stop this type of shit. Even most conservatives find this sort of thing repugnant, but the Republican lawmakers are pro-corporation and fuck-everone-else, but keep getting voted in, so they keep passing laws to enable this shit (and repealing laws that are in place to try prevent it). The current administration’s rollbacks of all Obama-era safeguards in just about every area are simply the latest examples of this.
This is what happens when you leave business to run business… after all the hands have been greased, politicians have been paid for, and all regulations stripped away.
Don’t worry all, its only gonna get worse as the current administration continues to erode further protections, or as some say " making America great again"
This was covered early on in “The Grapes of Wrath.”
The Joads realized they can’t point a gun at a system.
I don’t think the banks are stupid. I’m sure that they have a way of turning around and sticking someone else for it. This is just the latest incarnation of the junk bond takeover scam.
Because the thieves wrote the law.
https://twitter.com/eiwbm_cat/status/1003422302447505409?s=21
Money is power, and power corrupts. All of this is capitalism working as normal.
They say “capitalism”. They say “free enterprise”. I say slavery.
It was a hostile takeover in this case, I know.
I think you’re misreading the blame as being placed solely on Amazon. Blaming it on Toys R Us isn’t right either, though, as the post makes clear, I think. Vulture capitalists enacted a hostile takeover and saddled the company with the debt they took on in order to buy the company in the first place. As the company struggled with debt interest payments that increasingly matched flagging profits, the venture capitalists then paid themselves hundreds of millions of dollars in “consulting fees” to add, well, injury to injury, moving the company’s debts into the unsustainable. It then failed, as was inevitable given the massive fucking debt. So yes, it wasn’t Amazon’s fault - Toys R Us would have survived if their revenue hadn’t gone down because of Amazon, but at the same time, it still would have been nicely profitable if it hadn’t been crushed under debt payments. The fault was the venture capitalists’.
How? How?!
By voting for Trump, and Obama, and Bush Jr., and Clinton, etc. uniformly handing the reins of government over to elected representatives who can only see social goods in terms of “market-driven solutions.”
By steadfastly voting the lesser of two evils for four decades in an accelerating dismantling of the welfare state under some religious belief that steadily concentrating wealth is some kind of natural order of things that it is sinful to interfere with.
By voting as if they weren’t working class or poor or even middle-class, but simply failed billionaires.
Showing up to your job ≠ civic engagement.
Vote union. Vote progressive. Vote socialist.
The only “service” they provide is to themselves and to anyone who is an investor along with them (stockholder in the buyout firm, for example). But the reason they exist is that there are companies with valuable assets or a lot of cash on the books that nevertheless are not profitable, and are struggling. The buyout firm raises funds and buys the company. Offer enough money and they will sell, or you can try a hostile takeover. Correction to the original post, though: frequently they don’t actually want the company to go bankrupt; they want instead to cut costs and sell off any under-performing divisions, and generally clean it up nice so they can unload it by taking it public again. Then, afterwards, frequently it goes bankrupt, due to the debt load, but the buyout firm has gotten their payday and they don’t care.
Yeah but you can make CEO’s look over there shoulder at all times
.
Which Amerikans? A good 40-45% feel this is the way it is. If it is done in the name of capitalism it is god’s will. The other 55-60% will also have to content with the u.s. military because they will follow the right wingers. It’s all in the name of making Amerika great again.
It’s not a matter of going to their homes and protesting. If this was done en mass, the local police, the national guard and eventually the u.s. military would be there to gun people down. They wouldn’t think twice about it. If thousands of people are going to do this, they had better be armed and prepared to take as many right wingers with them and also prepare to die or be arrested, tortured and thrown in prison to never see the light of day again. Our republic is gone. The great Amerikan experiment has failed.
The value to banks, is that debt is a commodity. The longer it goes unpaid, the more valuable it becomes as interest accrues (risk theoretically goes up as well, but…). They sell it to someone, they sell it to someone else, and eventually the game of hot potato can go one of two ways, either it gets broken up and sold to smaller investors like across 401Ks and the like, or a big bank gets the bill and kicks it to the government because if they aren’t around to make loans anymore, then the cogs get no grease, with no grease the machine grinds to a halt and when that happens, when people have nothing left to lose, that’s when the pitchforks come out.
My problem is with the Zero Point Money used to do these takeovers.
Basically the takeover vultures write a giant IOU that they can’t cover until they have the assets of their target to loot.
Sears has been circling the drain for years, now.
I don’t think you read. This article is about the people who bought the company, ran it into the ground, paid all the assets to themselves, and then defaulted on their obligations to employees. Amazon is only peripherally involved as both the “big bad wolf” that sells the story of why they need a massively expensive restructuring to stay relevant as well as the beneficiary when that restructuring turns out to be only designed to saddle the company with unpayable debts.
Funny how, when one picks “you’re a fucking loser” as one’s user name, it turns every single post by that user into an insulting remark 
