The United States and China recently planned to restart talks for an investment treaty with “Beijing dropping previous efforts to protect certain sectors of its economy from the start.”1 While government-directed investment into resources and finance remain the vast majority of overall Chinese investment in the United States (over 90%), many private investment players have…
Tag: Private Equity
Petroleum and Private Equity: PE Firms Increase Investments in the Oil and Gas Industry
Demand for global energy resources has made the energy industry an attractive target for private equity investment. According to a 2013 report by Bain & Company, the strength of recent fundraising activity by PE funds indicates that energy investments will be popular in years to come.1 Within the energy industry, the most attractive area for…
Private Equity Funds’ New Tax Challenge: Tax Breaks Through Monitoring Fees
For years, regulators have scrutinized the tax practices of private equity firms on several fronts. One relatively recent example occurred in 2012 when the New York Attorney General led an investigation regarding private equity funds’ conversion of certain management fees into investments that are eligible for more favorable tax treatment, also known as fee waiver…
New Faces in Venture Capital
Often, when we think of the people involved in financial markets, images of old, stodgy men come to mind. But this is not usually the case, especially in today’s modern venture capital markets. Especially in the technology industry, venture capitalists hope to get in on the ground floor of startups that will become “the next…
Royalty Financing: An Emerging Alternative to Equity Financing
Definition of Royalty Financing Royalty financing is an investment vehicle where the investor lends money to investees against its future revenue streams.1 The investor is repaid via royalties, a regular stream of payments that are typically calculated based on a percentage of the company’s gross revenue.2 Since repayments are based on a percentage of revenues,…
How Private Equity Can Hedge Their Bet with ObamaCare
The Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, came into effect earlier this year. Not surprisingly, ObamaCare has proven to be an extremely controversial and divisive issue. Many opponents of ObamaCare argue that the law will prove to be extremely detrimental to the economy by burdening companies with increased costs and regulations.1 The relevant topic…
The Caribbean Detroit: Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis
Despite the severity of the debt circumstances in Puerto Rico, the financial crisis has gone largely unnoticed. The lack of attention on Puerto Rico is particularly shocking when comparing the crisis to the current state of Detroit. The island has a population of 3.7 million and debts of about $87 billion; this compares with a…
Newly Formed Private Equity Funds “Stalking”, not “Pouncing” on Mining Assets—For Now
There has been a lot of buzz lately in the private equity world about the formation of new funds and the raising of capital specifically aimed towards acquiring assets in the mining industry. Specifically, in their article on Bloomberg.com, Jesse Risenborough and Ruth David talk about how this recently created pool of private equity money…
Aeropostale’s PIPE Dream
Men and women of my generation, and likely their parents, will be very familiar with the clothing company Aeropostale, as it was a fashion staple in the 90s and early 2000’s. However, since its heyday the clothing company has been in steady decline. Things have gotten much, much worse for Aeropostale in the last few…
What is Real Estate Private Equity?
Since the 2008 Economic Recession, many of the maxims that investors have lived by have been challenged and proven wrong. One of these, albeit hasty and uninformed, maxims—that real estate is a safe investment that will continuously appreciate in value over time—has been convincingly disproven to anyone who has paid attention to the volatility of…