Home » Posts tagged 'blackstone'

Tag Archives: blackstone

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

The Chilling Thing Blackstone Said about the Oil Bust

April 20, 2015

The Chilling Thing Blackstone Said about the Oil Bust

Regardless of how troubled oil and gas companies are, “if the assets are good, someone will own them,” explained David Foley, senior managing director of Blackstone Energy Partners.

He expected companies to buckle under the load of junk debt and kick off a long series of bankruptcies and assets sales at rock-bottom prices. The question was when.

That was in February. Private equity firms – the “smart money” – have been out in force for months, raising tens of billions of dollars, with the promise to their investors that they would pick up assets of all kinds on the cheap. They’ve been circling like vultures, waiting to swoop down and pick the best morsels off the carcasses soon to be strewn about the oil patch.

“The timing of having that capital available now really couldn’t be better,” Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman said at the time. He expected that it would take one-and-a-half years before oil and gas companies would be completely drained of cash and would get into serious trouble. But some of the service companies could run out of money and topple “very, very quickly,” he said. Over the next couple of years, there would be “all kinds of shakeouts.”

PE firms expected valuations to plunge much further as assets would hit the auction block. And so Blackstone president Tony James said that his people were “scrambling” to invest over $10 billion. They were all singing from the same page.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Special Report: Why Madrid’s poor fear Goldman Sachs and Blackstone | Reuters

October 24, 2014

Special Report: Why Madrid’s poor fear Goldman Sachs and Blackstone | Reuters.

(Reuters) – Last year Madrid’s city and regional governments sold almost 5,000 rent-controlled flats to private equity investors including Goldman Sachs and Blackstone. At the time, the tenants were told their rental conditions would remain the same.

But as old contracts expire, dozens of people have received demands for higher rent, been told their rents will increase dramatically, been threatened with eviction or moved out to escape the insecurity. Thousands of Spain’s poor now depend for their homes on the generosity of private equity.

Jamila Bouzelmat is one of them.

The mother of six lives in a four-bedroom flat on the outskirts of the Spanish capital that was bought jointly by Goldman and a Spanish firm. The 44-year-old said that until March her family paid 58 euros ($73) a month in rent out of her husband’s 500-euro unemployment benefit. In April, her bank statement shows, her new landlords suddenly took 436 euros from her bank account.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress