It’s autumn already. A heavy fog covers the farm this morning, the first this year.
September can be beautiful here. Not yet cold. But no longer hot. The grass is green, and the sky is clear.
Then, in the evening, the horizontal sun filters through the golden leaves and the whole place lights up.
Giving up the fight
Yesterday, Toys ‘R’ Us went broke.
The story is being widely discussed this morning, with the usual mainstream analysts telling us that the bankruptcy was ‘expected’ and that the brick-and-mortar toy retailer was just ‘another victim of Amazon.com’.
That is not untrue. But there is an important nuance…
Artificially low interest rates allowed Wall Street hustlers — notably Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, an investor in Toys ‘R’ Us — to borrow heavily against the company.
Apparently, Bain didn’t use this money to build a better Toys ‘R’ Us — strengthening its online presence to compete with Amazon, for example.
More likely, it used it as the Wall Street players always do: to pay themselves off.
Bonuses, fees, dividends — typically, the private-equity suits take the capital out of capitalism. They move it from the Main Street economy to the financial economy…leaving the poor retailer to struggle to survive.
Toys ‘R’ Us gave up the fight yesterday.
Read the rest of the article here..
https://www.marketsandmoney.com.au/bitter-winter-us-stocks/2017/09/25/
