The Peter G. Peterson foundation claims to be bipartisan, yet their former CEO is out pimping a book, a new advocacy group and a position. Peter G. Peterson served as Secretary of Commerce under Richard Nixon. He claims to be very, very, very concerned about our deficit, yet not one word is uttered in this report about Wall Street's contribution to the deficit, the collapse of our economy, or any responsibility on the part of the financial industry to help reduce the deficit they helped create.
Peterson Foundation staff members served as staff to Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Peter G. Peterson is founder of Blackstone Group, an investment group that made him billions during his Wall Street tenure. He is a fiscal conservative, a deficit hawk and he and his foundation are on a mission to tell us that we should all sacrifice and suffer to pay off the national debt while letting Wall Street completely off the hook.
Erskine Bowles is also on Wall Street's payroll, so it's not too much of a surprise to discover that he might have "forgotten" to pay attention to Wall Street responsibility for our current economic woes.
Here's a little more on Peterson and his Blackstone partner Stephen Schwarzman. But what I really want to do is walk backward to the summer of 2007, and this Salon article about Peterson's partner Stephen Schwarzman, his investment firm Blackstone Group, and Wall Street irresponsibility.
Next came a cover story in the March 5 Fortune declaring Schwarzman, who had just completed the gigantic acquisition of Equity Office Properties, "The New King of Wall Street." Then, only a few months after saying that Sarbanes-Oxley was deterring companies from going public, he filed a huge IPO for the Blackstone Group. If it goes through as planned, according to the Wall Street Journal, Schwarzman's sale will be worth $7.5 billion. This offering included several wrinkles that solidified Schwarzman's smartest-guy-in-the-room reputation but also seemed designed to elicit scrutiny. As the Financial Times reported ($ required), the preliminary prospectus said the firm planned to "book profits from private equity at the time an asset is bought"—not when the assets are sold, as most businesses do. More significantly, the offering was structured as a "publicly traded partnership" to take advantage of an absurd wrinkle in the tax code. Under current rules, the asset-management fees that private-equity partnerships like Blackstone reap are taxed not at the 35 percent corporate income-tax rate, but at the 15 percent long-term capital-gains rate, allowing Blackstone to save tens of millions of dollars annually on its tax bill. Finally, in May, at a time when concerns about China's role in the global economy and its influence on the United States were at a fever pitch, Schwarzman agreed to sell a 10 percent stake in Blackstone to an entity controlled by China's government.
This is the partner of the man who is spending huge sums of money to tell us we're all doomed because China owns some of our debt? Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson are just tools. This guy is the string puller, and he's putting fake campaign ads on the air, sending his former CEO out on a publicity tour, and basically trying to sell us all a bill of goods for what?
Here's my bottom line on our good friends at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. They may not be extremists like Dick Armey and his ilk, but they are motivated by power, profit, and what's good for Wall Street, not what's good for ordinary folks like you and me. Given their deep and fundamental involvement in this draft report, my verdict is that the whole thing should be rejected on its face, simply because motives aren't altruistic, nor are they really serious about what's good for the country. They're far more serious about what's good for investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and Wall Street.
