Who dat

Watching Paul Krugman bitch slap Jon Moulton on Newsnight was fun. Like for all Jon Moulton, rightly, made his (public) name speaking vast amounts of common sense about Rover as the Phoenix debacle took shape, it turns out he’s a pro-austerity fella and as such deserved all he got. One wee thing that confused me though is the way he keeps getting introduced/described as a venture capitalist, because my understanding is he’s not.

Like calling Moulton a venture capitalist is like calling a dentist a gerontologist. So sure a dentist and a gerontologist are both medical fellas, but they’re ones with very distinctive specialisms/areas of expertise, who do different things and use different tools. Similarly, whereas a venture capitalist typically focuses on early stage businesses and typically, besides commercial savvy, provides technical expertise related to what it is a business does as well as equity, yer man Moulton is better described as a private equity bod, who targets well established concerns e.g. Reader’s Digest, and provides/inflicts generic financial engineering alongside commercial savvy. Plus, his deals typically involve oodles of debt with a cheeky wee bit of equity on the side.

Rather than pedantry, the nomenclature being used matters. A lot. Back before the credit crunch crunched private equity became one of capitalism’s more evil, unacceptable faces, one dominated by multi-millionaires who paid less tax than their cleaners and who couldn’t attend a black tie do without protestors barracking them as they rolled up in their respective Aston Martins, Ferraris, Bentleys etc.,. And while that was here and then, over in the US right now there’s a wee, politicised debate about the worth of private equity prompted by the fact Mitt Romney made his fortune in it.

Ahhh, I’ve answered my question about howcome private equity people are now being called venture capitalists by the mainstream British media haven’t I? It’s a way of involving them in public debate whilst avoiding debate and disassociates them from what was previously said and thought. Plus, venture capital is a much more moral, credible and legitimate activity – the strike rate for venture capital investments is much lower than it is for private equity i.e. venture capital really does involve the risk taking that provides one of the major justifications for economic inequality. Plus, venture capitalists genuinely do help bring new things to the table, Facebook being an obvious example, a media thang that’s in as sharp a contrast with the investment made in Reader’s Digest by Jon Moulton’s company as it’s possible to find. So perhaps rather than be inaccurate the BBC etc., should use a new label in line with how these guys are now being presented, howzabout they call Jon Moulton et all, the bearer’s of God’s golden balls of economic common sense?

Except, getting some accuracy into the chat would also highlight private equity’s current problems (though funnily enough not ones that apply to venture capital to anything like the same degree, which stem from the fact we’re in a credit crunch.

This is because the private equity model and private equity profits are predicated on the ready availability of credit; the more private equity borrows to leverage a deal and the cheaper it borrows, the more profitable it is. Unfortunately, since late 2007/early 2008 there has been a step change in the availability of credit and the terms on which it’s lent. Basically, it’s far harder for private equity investors to buy up a company and make money primarily on the back of swapping expensive equity for cheap credit. Instead, they have to work a damn sight harder and be more creative i.e. they actually have to add value.

Now a couple of things follow on from this. One is what in fucking hell was a high profile private equity boy i.e. a player in an entire industry/asset class predicated on borrowing as much as possible as cheaply as possible, doing arguing against the use of cheap debt to ease the economic misery of tens of thousands of people. Seriously. Like private equity loading a business up with debt so half a dozen people can buy more Tuscan villas is a good thing whereas government borrowing to build necessary infrastructure that also cuts unemployment is bad why exactly? And to borrow Paul Krugman’s chat about how economies differ from households, my liability/debt is your asset i.e. the holes in British bank balance sheets that taxpayers subsequently filled were partly punched into them by private equity boys who made personal fortunes as a result.

The other thing, of course, is that if I was a venture capitalist, “ahem” private equity investor, I’d be smart enough to realise the cheap credit days are gone for the foreseeable future so would be looking elsewhere to make my millions.

I know, if we can’t cut the cost of the debt that’s integral to the private equity business model, lets look at influencing other costs, most obviously labour. And hey presto we’ve just had another “venture capitalist” Adrian Beecroft i.e. no he isn’t he’s a private equity bod who just happens to give money to the Tories, producing a government report recommending changes to employment law geared almost entirely to cutting labour costs in ways that (a) would have a significantly adverse impact on what lots of people earn and (b) would consequently increase the tax credit subsidy employers already receive.

So the view of leading “venture capitalists” is that only private equity should be allowed to borrow big, with the taxpayer taking the risk, and that taxpayers should also hand over even more money than they already do to “venture capitalists” via the tax credit subsidies paid to the recipients of shit wages in the companies they buy so they can get even more Aston Martins, Ferraris, Bentleys etc.,. Alternatively, howzabout spades start getting called spades and private equity, private equity.


A July 24th P.S. -  the distinction between Private Equity (was leveraged buyout as a mate minded me) and venture capital clearly matters in the US if not here judging by the attempts now being made by venture capitalists there to disassociate themselves from Mitt - he was private equity not venture capital , geddit! - Romney.