Blackstone ready to strike again Soon Very soon

Submitted by snoopydawg on Sat, 12/12/2020 - 7:29pm

GOP Megadonor Celebrates His Profits From “Huge Increases In Rents” As Millions Face Eviction

The world’s largest private equity firm has bankrolled campaigns against rent control and been accused by the United Nations of fueling a global housing crisis. Now, as millions are threatened with eviction during the pandemic, Blackstone’s top executive is openly bragging that the firm is making huge profits off of rent increases.

At the Goldman Sachs’ Financial Services Conference on December 9, Blackstone’s billionaire CEO Stephen Schwartzman boasted that after the 2008 financial crisis, his firm was able to cash in on the mortgage crisis. At the time, the company was able to buy up foreclosed homes and convert them into rental properties subsequently plagued by accusations of dilapidation and excessive fees — all while it received a big financial boost from the government.

Schwartzman, a top Republican donor and close ally of President Trump, indicated his firm is positioning itself for a similar jackpot.

“You always have winners and losers — Blackstone was a huge winner coming out of the global financial crisis and I think something similar is going to happen,” he said.

Noting that about half of his private equity firm’s revenues are now from real estate, Schwarzman added: “We're the largest owner of real estate in the private world. And that asset class has boomed with huge increases in rents, almost no occupancies, [and] rent collections from almost everyone.”

Read the rest to see how Blackstone made billions off of foreclosed homes, drove up rents and home prices and has lobbied to keep rent control from happening.

Think about this:

Obama gave Blackstone money to buy up foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar instead of giving people money so they WOULDN'T be foreclosed on.

Hundreds of thousands of people have already been evicted even with the moratorium against evictions and million more people are going to be kicked out of their homes and apartments early next year if congress fails to act. This sure looks like an all out war on the lower working class. From forcing them back to work without proper PPE to no financial support to everything else they have done or haven’t done to no talk about people being assured that they won’t go bankrupt if they get COVID nor is Biden saying that he will do the things he gave Trump crap for not doing. Health care workers are still getting sick and dying because they still don’t have enough PPE. ..Hey Joe are you going to get that you know that thing going so that people do have enough? It’s hard to remember what Biden said...oh wait. Here he is in his own words:

That’s right. The war production act. So Joe will you do anything with that?

David Dayan talks about how bad this will be for millions.

We discussed this back in March and it was a good discussion if you’re interested.

The empire is ending, this is a fire sale

Remember this?

People were talking about rent strikes in April. Did it happen? What will happen January 1st? People who are getting evicted won’t have long to wait because landlords have already been to court and have their warrants signed and ready to go. Remember that there is a new company out there for gig workers. They can sign up and then they will evict people from homes and apartments so that they can stay in their homes.

Heh whilst looking for the Biden tweet I checked a few older essays.

Here is one on Neera who warned that Bernie couldn’t be allowed to hijack the party.

People were not kind.
Smile

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Highway Robbery
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Submitted by snoopydawg on Sat, 12/12/2020 - 10:33pm
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Fannie Mae's $1 billion Blackstone deal draws fire

A $1 billion deal between Fannie Mae and Blackstone Group is drawing fire from the housing industry and consumer advocates as the investment firm prepares to sell its housing unit in an initial public offering.

The National Association of Realtors Tuesday accused Fannie Mae of subsidizing big investors at the expense of ordinary homebuyers and asked the company’s regulator to lower mortgage costs for rank-and-file borrowers. The National Community Stabilization Trust, a nonprofit that rehabilitates vacant properties, criticized Fannie for giving a lift to a company on the verge of going public and an industry with an imperfect record of tenant relations.

Fannie’s loan guarantee, which ultimately is backed by taxpayers, will lower borrowing costs for Blackstone’s Invitation Homes unit, allowing the company to add to the 50,000 single-family rentals it already owns, many acquired at rock-bottom prices during the housing collapse.

....

Invitation Homes disclosed the Fannie deal last week in a SEC filing announcing its public offering. It comes as rising mortgage rates, high prices and a tight supply of houses and condos for sale make homeowership challenging for first-time and lower-income buyers.

“Rather than focusing on allowing well-qualified Americans to build wealth through affordable mortgages options, Fannie Mae is actively financing large institutions to compete with them,” NAR President William Brown wrote in a Jan. 31 letter to Fannie regulator Mel Watt, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. “These investors do not expand the affordable housing stock. Rather, in this limited market they drive up the price of rents and remove affordable inventory from the hands of American homeowners.”

....

Hedge funds and other investment companies bought up cheap foreclosures by the tens of thousands after the 2008 crash, converting them to rental homes. Now they are some of America’s biggest landlords and some have come under fire for their eviction practices.

....

“Charging individual borrowers substantially higher fees than the actual risk they present, while at the same time subsidizing investors able to raise billions of dollars on their own, undermines the GSEs’ public mission,” NAR’s Brown wrote. “Our nation needs the GSEs to bolster homeownership opportunities for millions of responsible, middle class American families, not funding special interest deals with Wall Street financial firms.”

Advocates for low-income housing said the Fannie deal deploys resources where they’re least needed.

Subsidizing the richest company to buy up foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar while not helping we the people should have been the thing that exposed Obama for who he was, but he’s still going to get a pass for Blackstone does it because people will blame Trump for the setup. Sure he IS to blame for how the government responded to the epidemic, but congress and individual governors also have to take the blame. This was a coordinated effort by a lot of people. Remember how indignant we were with the 1st bailout where we got peanuts to the Rich’s lobster? Nothing came from it.

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Scientists are concerned that conspiracy theories may die out if they keep coming true at the current alarming rate.

Submitted by Fishtroller 02 on Sun, 12/13/2020 - 9:16am

@snoopydawg

he left office?

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"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

Submitted by The Liberal Moonbat on Mon, 12/14/2020 - 10:36pm
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If there's one thing nobody could ever accuse Jews of before, it was being parasitic landowners.

How dare the .01% clutch their pearls over the Charleston-Tiki-Torcher-types when THEY ARE FUCKING ENGINEERING THEM....

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

Submitted by Lookout on Sun, 12/13/2020 - 7:39am
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they would give money to homeowners and renters instead of banks...the people would use the money to pay mortgages and rents...and the banks would still get the money, but not the fire sale on foreclosed places.

Capitalism ate democracy a long time ago. There's blackrock as well as blackstone...

When Larry Fink and his co-founders started his fledgling risk management and bond analytics advisory firm in 1988, he was seeded by Blackstone co-founders Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson. In fact, the firm known today as BlackRock started life as Blackstone Financial Management.

In time, ‘Blackstone Financial Management’ grew rapidly. By 1994, with over $50 billion under management, it became time for the two organizations to formally separate. In a decision I imagine he has since had cause to regret more than once, Schwarzman allowed Fink to call the business ‘BlackRock’. While this may have been a natural evolution of its original name, I can’t imagine Schwarzman would have agreed to this arrangement if he’d had the slightest sense for what BlackRock would become. In recent years he has (I believe) acknowledged that a tipping point arrived a few years ago where people went from referring to BlackRock as Blackstone (since the latter was historically the better known brand) to referring to Blackstone as BlackRock.

https://www.quora.com/Are-Blackstone-and-Blackrock-related-to-one-anothe...

As Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) represented our old financial overlords, Blackstone represents the new ones. Two of its executives will have top jobs in President-elect Joe Biden’s administration.

Meanwhile, Blackrock shares are up nearly 80% since my 2017 story came out. They closed Dec. 4 at $703.47 with a market capitalization of $109 billion and a pricey (for the banking sector) price-to-earnings ratio of 23. It’s fully justified.

The price is high because Blackrock isn’t a bank. It’s an investment advisor, helping institutions invest across a broad range of asset classes, public and private. It’s best known for its exchange-traded funds (ETFs), iShares. It had about $7.4 trillion in assets under management at the end of last year. That’s more than twice the assets controlled by J.P. Morgan Chase (NYSE:JPM). Blackrock is the world’s biggest shadow bank.

https://investorplace.com/2020/12/blk-stock-blackrock-welcome-our-new-fi...

From last April

In less than a week the Federal Reserve has been merged with the U.S. Treasury (implying it wasn’t always that way) and BlackRock, the world’s largest and most powerful financial services institution, has been put in charge of executing future acquisitions and trades.

https://www.sgtreport.com/2020/04/blackrock-megacorporation-just-took-ov...

It is a failed system for the people, but a great one for the corporate oligarchs!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Submitted by eyo on Mon, 12/14/2020 - 3:01am

@Lookout Vangaurd Group is #1 with 106M shares, $6.2B.
https://stockzoa.com/ticker/cvs/
---
And this is just sad: https://cvshealth.com/about-cvs-health/our-purpose/our-history

1963 — The first CVS store, selling health and beauty products, is founded in Lowell, Massachusetts by brothers Stanley and Sidney Goldstein and partner Ralph Hoagland. CVS stands for Consumer Value Stores.
... [snip long history of continuous rapacious greed, corporate style]
2018 — CVS Health fights back on high cost drugs by launching industry’s most comprehensive approach to saving patients money.

CVS Health completes acquisition of Aetna, marking the start of transforming the consumer health experience.

WTF? The CVS in Cloverdale was a hot mess last time I dared to enter, and nothing says healthy like a giant wall of cheap booze, eh? Sin taxes galore. la la la Don't look at the tents downstream, just keep flushing.

good luck
fatty liver

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Submitted by Cant Stop the M... on Mon, 12/14/2020 - 8:58pm
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@Lookout

Or, rather, until civilization collapses and their security chiefs realize that there's nothing stopping them from shooting their bosses in the face and taking their stuff.

Dipshits.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
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"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Submitted by snoopydawg on Sun, 12/13/2020 - 10:04am
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Leifheit and her co-authors published a study last month that found states that lifted their eviction bans had double the cases and five times more deaths compared to states that left their eviction bans in place. North Carolina, for example, banned evictions in April. When the state lifted the ban June 20, renters were left unprotected until the CDC moratorium went into effect on Sept. 4. Authorities carried out an estimated 18,000 evictions in those three months. Leifheit’s study found this resulted in 15,690 extra coronavirus cases and 304 deaths.

The looming eviction crisis is not only a moral failing and a financial catastrophe, but an unprecedented public health disaster. A large body of evidence has found links between evictions and health outcomes ranging from homelessness to domestic violence to chronic stress.

“If we get a wave of mass evictions in the new year, we’re going to see a huge range of long-term effects,” said Kathryn Leifheit, a UCLA researcher who studies the effect of housing disruptions on health.

It’s extraordinarily shortsighted and cruel to allow this many evictions to occur.

Across the U.S., evictions led to 434,000 COVID-19 cases and nearly 11,000 deaths. But only a small portion of those deaths likely occurred among people who were evicted themselves, Leifheit said. The vast majority were second- and third-degree infections caused by evicted tenants coming in contact with other people through their households or jobs.

“We tend to think about the link between evictions and COVID-19 as an individual process — someone gets evicted, they get COVID-19 and then, in the worst-case scenario, they die,” Leiftheit said. “But a wave of evictions ends up increasing the risk for everyone.”

“The people being evicted aren’t necessarily low-income anymore,” she said. “We’ve got a lot more people dealing with evictions who have never been through one before and have no idea how the process works.”

And these impacts don’t just affect renters. Poor tenants are more likely to be essential workers, take public transportation and rely on food banks. These activities put them in contact with other people and risk extending the chain of coronavirus infection — and fueling even more evictions.

“We’re starting to understand the relationship between evictions and health as cyclical,” Leifheit said. “Evictions lead to poor health, but poor health also leads to evictions.”

Rent relief is a no-brainer

The only good news about the eviction crisis is that it can be prevented with a relatively straightforward fix: rental assistance.

Worth a full read if you can stand the heartbreak.

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Scientists are concerned that conspiracy theories may die out if they keep coming true at the current alarming rate.

Submitted by MrWebster on Sun, 12/13/2020 - 11:25am

In listening to Pelosi, she seems to believe the vaccine will solve all problems. She probably believes that the vaccine will allow people to work at slave wages and ensure their rents and mortgages.

If we called the homeless in the country "refugees", the US would be denouncing the US over human rights violations.

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Submitted by Cant Stop the M... on Mon, 12/14/2020 - 8:48pm
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https://www.blackstone.com/insights/article/steve-schwarzman-and-jon-gra...

People talk a lot about how bad it is to realize, in middle age, how dumb you were when you were young. There's not a lot of talk about how bad it is to realize, in middle age, that you were completely right about something when you were young.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver