What Does the ‘Doomsday Investor’ Get out of Trump?
[Note the byline. This post may contain speculative content. / ~Rayne]
There’s a particularly interesting long read by Sheelah Kolhatkar in this week’s New Yorker, entitled, Paul Singer, Doomsday Investor.
If you’re not into investment and Wall Street machinations, you might go to sleep on this one. Even the subhead is a bit of a snooze if you’re not interested in the world of money:
The head of Elliott Management has developed a uniquely adversarial, and immensely profitable, way of doing business.
This blurb could describe almost any manager on Wall Street if they’ve broken with trends and employed some testosterone-enhanced swagger at some point in their career.
But stay with this one, the payoff is in the latter half of the article. Perhaps you already know of Paul Singer — just roll to the latter half.
Singer is a major funder of Washington Free Beacon, which some of you will recognize as a conservative online media outlet. It’s not very big and its output is rather predictable once you grasp its apparent ideology.
You may also remember this outlet as the progenitor of the competitive intelligence dossier on then-candidate Donald Trump, which eventually ended with Free Beacon and picked up again with law firm Perkins Coie on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The folio eventually included the Steele dossier once Free Beacon’s research contractor Fusion GPS was signed on by Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele’s UK-based firm Orbis Business Intelligence to provide additional overseas content.
Free Beacon admitted it was the origin of the initial pre-Steele Trump dossier, copping to it on October 27, 2017 — long after part of the Steele dossier had been published by BuzzFeed and after Fusion GPS’ Glenn Simpson had been interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee (August 22, 2017) but before an interview with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (November 14, 2017).
What’s particularly interesting about the New Yorker article is the description of dossiers compiled and used as leverage to muscle a certain type of performance from business managers. Singer’s team at his hedge fund Elliott Management uses them with what appears to be practiced ease for profit as in this example:
The pressure that Elliott exerts, combined with its fearsome reputation, can make even benign-sounding statements seem sinister. In 2012, Elliott made an investment in Compuware, a software company based in Detroit. Arbitration testimony by former Compuware board members hints at just how negatively they interpreted some of Elliott’s actions. During an early meeting, one of them testified, Cohn presented folders containing embarrassing personal information about board members, which they saw as a threat to publicize the contents. Cohn allegedly mentioned the daughter of one board member, and commented disapprovingly on the C.E.O.’s vintage Aston Martin, a car that few people knew he owned. The company’s co-founder, Peter Karmanos, accused Elliott of “blackmailing” Compuware’s board, and reportedly remarked that the fund “can come in, rip apart the pieces” of a company, and “try to have a fire sale and maybe make twenty per cent on their money, and they look like heroes.”
Cohn told me that Compuware’s executives were “very firmly in that fear camp.” He was surprised that material on their professional backgrounds—which he says was all those folders contained—was “interpreted as a dossier of threatening personal information,” and noted that driving an Aston Martin looked bad for a C.E.O. whose biggest customers were Detroit automakers. Compuware was ultimately sold to a private-equity firm.
The really nifty trick Singer pulled off outside of Elliott Management is his arm’s length relationship to the Washington Free Beacon as a funder though the Free Beacon uses research dossiers prepared by contractors in much the same way as Elliott Management.
Conversion of Washington Free Beacon from a nonprofit 501(c)4 news outlet to a for-profit business in August 2014 also assured additional distance and privacy for Singer. A nonprofit is obligated to file reports with the government which are available to the public. For-profit businesses that are privately held do not.
And for-profit news outlets can do all manner of research and not have to share it with the public, protected by the First Amendment (“reporters’ privilege,” however, does have a limit — see Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972))
One can only wonder what kind of research Washington Free Beacon has collected but not actually shared with the public in reporting. Has funder Paul Singer or his business Elliott Management had access to this research?
One can only wonder, too, what it is that Paul Singer has obtained from the Trump presidency, as Singer has been depicted as anti-Trump:
… The Beacon has a long-standing and controversial practice of paying for opposition research, as it did against Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 Presidential campaign. Singer was a vocal opponent of Trump during the Republican primaries, and, last year, it was revealed that the Beacon had retained the firm Fusion GPS to conduct research on Trump during the early months of the campaign. By May, 2016, when it had become clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee, the Beacon told Fusion to stop its investigation. Fusion was also hired by the Democratic National Committee, and eventually compiled the Christopher Steele dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. … (Emphasis mine.)
With so little daylight between Singer and Free Beacon and the abrupt end of Free Beacon’s intelligence research when Trump became the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for president, one might wonder why the research halted if Singer was so anti-Trump.
Or are there benefits for a “Doomsday Investor” to having someone so easily compromised and predictably narcissistic in the White House — benefits none of the GOP primary candidates nor Hillary Clinton offered? Was the Free Beacon’s initial dossier on Trump prepared not to find fault in order to deter his election, but instead to provide leverage?
Note once again the Free Beacon is “a privately owned, for-profit online newspaper” according to its About Us page. Yet the outlet doesn’t have advertising — only a single banner slot off the front page which might be a donation rather than a sold spot — and a store selling Free Beacon branded items, the kind typically used for promotional swag. If this is a for-profit business, what’s it selling?
Treat this as an open thread.
“Or are there benefits for a “Doomsday Investor” to having someone so easily compromised and predictably narcissistic in the White House — benefits none of the GOP primary candidates nor Hillary Clinton offered? Was the Free Beacon’s initial dossier on Trump prepared not to find fault in order to deter his election, but instead to provide leverage?”
I think it’s simpler than that. Oligarchies prefer weak leaders. They need figureheads for the public to focus their ire on, but the real power rests elsewhere. Nothing about market behavior lately suggests that investors think it matters what happens to Trump. Trump levies massive tariffs on China, markets go up. Trump is alleged to have directed a criminal act, markets go up. Trump threatens nuclear war, markets go up.
I think the more interesting questions are big picture questions. For example, what techniques are used for increasing inequality? Some are traditional, like consolidation to produce oligopoly or getting direct payments from the Treasury. But others are novel, such as the increase in volatility. If a stock goes up 10% a year in a straight line, the most you can make is 10% a year. But if it goes up 5% and down 5% every month and you can anticipate that movement, then you can make 10% a month.
The real Doomsday Investor is the one who is planning on global warming kill the majority of humankind. They exist, and they are planning to make a killing on it.
An investor like Singer still needs specific targets, though, unlike a broader fund that might make its money off of bets against a country’s currency.
I would guess he’s not at all alone among investors who compile intimate dirt on targets, and possibly not the only one going after Trump, just as I’m sure the US and Russian intelligence communities haven’t been the only ones watching Trump all these years.
And quite frankly, it’s likely he made the same realization the GOP did – scandal wasn’t going to shake Trump and he would make more money working with him than against him. Imagine the money you can make if you have dirt on a political appointee who oversees contracts. And imagine the access you could get if you could offer Trump dirt on his enemies. It may help explain a little bit why there is so little dissent among the congressional GOP.
As for specific targets, American business has gone all out for predatory capitalism. You could probably throw a dart at the Fortune list and find a company whose board or top management had closets full of peccadillos whose release would imperil their ability to remain in a C suite or lower stock prices.
You do have to pick one restrained or small enough that it won’t throw an army of counter-dirty tricksters back at you ten times as hard.
One way of predicting price movements is having adverse information about a company or one of its leaders. Another is having inside information. Having dirt on a corporate insider gives one both, plus the ability to create the price movement. Icahn recently used his job as a regulatory advisor to create price movement. In developing countries, market movers can create volatility simply by expressing pleasure or displeasure; Trump has done that with Turkey.
So, I don’t disagree. I just think Singer is using one strategy of many that fit into a more general pattern of creating volatility with some manner of anticipating price movements. The implication is that we can probably squelch a lot of this sort of predatory capitalism with conservative measures like taxing short-term capital gains at very high rates.
Point taken on volatility; have been working on a piece for some time now in which volatility figures largely.
I’m not certain it’s quite as simple as “oligarchies prefer weak leaders.” The U.S. has been important as a backstop for oligarchs because money in banks here isn’t likely to leak away due to corruption or lose much value. It may be more difficult to move money in and out but it’s been safe. Once the U.S. economy has been attacked in a way that money isn’t safe, there’s one less backstop and volatility becomes more erratic, less predictable. Not all oligarchs benefit from those conditions — only ones used to working with criminality.
Fascinating, informative discussion, as always. Thanks to all the usual suspects for the broadening commentary.
The point about the US having been relatively free of corruption (I think of it more that certain kinds of corruption aren’t kindly tolerated while other forms are celebrated among the powerful) is what has me thinking that the likes of the Koch Bros and others feasting off Trump’s wealth-concentrating antics should be careful what they wish for, lest they find the chaos and raw violence that Russian criminality brings to the table not so friendly to their bottom line, eventually.
As an aside, an Iraqi intellectual, former academic and former fan of the US, said to us from his refugee camp, “In Iraq, Americans are famous for corruption.” That one stuck with me.
One can provide many counter-examples to my statement that oligarchies prefer weak leaders. Some oligarchies, like Russia, are run by strongmen. But the existence of strongman leaders creates a focus of resistance.
By contrast, in the Gilded Age, US oligarchs were much stronger than government. There’s a famous story of JP Morgan parking a boatload of gold offshore, waiting for Washington’s reserves to run low due to a shortfall from mining. For a country on the gold standard, it was was equivalent to defaulting on the debt. When the US Government met his price, he sold them the gold.
I’d call the US an oligarchy run as a nominal democracy. And I’d call Trump a very weak president. But I’ll look forward to your analysis on both volatility and the relative stability of oligarchies run by strongmen vs. those run by nominal democracies.
Doesn’t seem like a great plan for leverage if they stopped as soon as the candidate inched closer to reality and the dossier becoming useful.
They may have had all the leverage they wanted and needed, based on what they understood at the time. And they may have misread the horse race just as much as the rest of the media did, flailing away at Clinton’s emails rather than noting the substantially different and opaque campaign running in social media. The incredibly small advertising expenditures should have been one big clue.
Thanks for this.
With Donald around, who reads other news of the world? Every barn burner needs a lightning rod. The Don is marvelous at diverting attention from other predatory capitalists.
Good post Rayne.
Some additional items:
They tried to pretend, “We didn’t know the call was coming from inside the house”. Pfft
____________________________________________
In the context of the above, it’s interesting that McCain circulated the dossier. And when you have the Koch brothers as allies, who needs ads or circulation revenue?
For Beaverbrook almost a century ago and for Murdoch today, the vehicles needed to make money. Now, it’s just as profitable for a global group to have a propaganda outlet that pressures political and other opponents and rewards supporters – when tied to sharp, open-handed lobbyists. The return on their costs is astronomical.
Exactly @earl. That’s why Kushner bought the Observer, which used to be a decent paper. All of the items were pro-Trump. And then a (past) reporter found that Kushner was quietly disappearing older articles.
Goldfarb, if you notice above, was touting the policies Trump is pushing today.
Pushing Zionism, anti-Muslim-ism and being aggressive with Iran.
Re: the NYT piece today about FireEye and the accounts removed by facebook, this bit:
And then, a few paragraphs later:
Anyone have any light to shed as to how FireEye was able to determine those Twitter accounts were linked to Iranian phones? At first I wondered if Twitter provided that data based on FireEye’s findings, but the latter statement seems to indicate FireEye can get this without the direct involvement of Twitter.
http://blog.executivebiz.com/2014/06/nsa-accredits-7-companies-for-cyber-incident-response-services/
Rayne said – treat this as an open thread. So….
Trump administration is using federal disability law to disenfranchise minority voters
Randolph County, Georgia is the latest place where officials are using the American with Disabilities Act to suppress votes.
No surprise that Brian Kemp (GA SoS) is oh so not involved in this effort /s. Governor’s race scumbag Kemp (R) vs. Stacey Abrams (D) – brilliant, accomplished, minority House speaker in GA, who happens to be black.
I grew up in Ga. My friends feel there are people who will stop at nothing to prevent Abrams’ win. Not to be overly dramatic, but some of us fear for Abrams’ life. This race can be seen as a bellwether for where we are today in terms of democratic/rule of law vs. autocratic/control by force.
The obscenity of this is that standard practice for non-ADA compliant facilities isn’t shutting them down, it’s bringing them up to requirements, or providing reasonable alternatives. This does neither, and it is absolutely true that forcing people with disabilities to travel farther to vote is the opposite of an accomodation.
thanks for reading, and for your comment.
GOP is worried, in panic, and probably someone in this mess is breaking the law.
But, they do not care about law.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/georgia-county-close-polling-places-access_us_5b7c7484e4b07295150dbaf3
To Prague, or not to Prague. That is the question.
It just puts my gut on edge whenever a Bidnitz World story opens with a narrator at unreliable as Jon freaking Bush.
Just to get slog thru the virtual tidal bore of b.s. in the piece (I’m quite open to conditional acceptance of a lot when it comes to myths about monsters like Icahn & Singer) required some interior screaming at the whole idea of the Klan Trump being different from Clan Bush mostly by degree: the holding of both families being profitable Ferengi grazing ground, the main difference being that one has a better mannered class of parasites and pestilence, whereas the other appears mobbed up from the ground to the hairweave.
Hear! Hear!
They’re all parasitic, only varying in degrees based on respect for the law and social norms. Most of them are very obvious in their parasitic behavior — we can fight what we can see. But I find this particular piece New Yorker piece interesting because it reveals some parasites which have adapted a cloak of invisibility to avoid detection and attack.
I’m also a bit annoyed at the attack on Compuware which had shaped much of downtown Detroit as General Motors rejiggered under bankruptcy reorganization. They had 4000 employees downtown; they’ve been bought by private equity, split into smaller entities and no longer appear as Compuware on the list of largest Detroit employers. This parasitic shit using mob tactics by guys like Singer has real effects on communities, not necessarily good, to the financial benefit of guys who create nothing and don’t live here in the debris they leave behind.
Love the Forengi reference. Perfect.
As evidenced by Trump sweeping the Republican Primaries, despite Fusion GPS and Steele discoveries, The Free Beacon seems analogous to yelling “Fire” in an empty theater. Fusion then went on toe DNC to shop it’s Trump crimes but even that didn’t work out so well. Is it the Distribution or the Story? I suspect both as America just does not give a damn about Rule of Law anymore.
Americans do care about the rule of law, at least a majority of them did and still do. This hints at how much responsibility Distribution carries since it is ignored daily by media that a majority didn’t vote for this gold-leafed hair weave in the White House. An entire cable network carries on as if Trump received the popular vote and didn’t win the electoral college by foreign-aided hijinks.
So what does everyone think about Sassy Sessions? LMAO. I will not politicize (I will only as it pertains to race).
Thanks for this, Rayne.
Chuck Todd just had some dude from the Free Beacon on his show [5 pm EDT], and husband + I were asking, “who/what is the Washington Free Beacon?” Now we know.
Another great piece of journalism from EW, and this one has brought me out from my lurking on this Blog to make my first comment. This has amazing echoes of what I just read about the hedge-fund owned American Media Inc. (AMI), owner of the Trump boosting National Enquirer. With hedge fund billionaire, and friend of Trump, Leon Cooperman’s Omega Charitable Partnership owning 10% of the equity and the majority 90% by Chatham Asset Management, run by junk bond trader Anthony Melchiorre. They took ownership through a debt for equity restructure back in 2014 – https://www.forbes.com/sites/debtwire/2018/07/27/american-media-quietly-seeking-425-million-in-bonds-as-legal-and-political-spectacle-swirls/
This article on the ownership and management of AMI makes it even more of a fishy looking deal – although I think some of the detail in this article could do with some verification – but the movements in management do look interesting and seem to be pretty incestuous with Trump Org. https://medium.com/@pulsecheckmail/potus-allies-dave-pecker-and-leon-cooperman-team-up-with-trumps-social-media-guru-to-run-the-9c733421f1a5
Anthony Melchiorre of Chatham Asset Management has a pretty ropey history with regard to republican party contributions, and the looting of the New Jersey pension fund under Guvnor Christie.. https://upload.democraticunderground.com/10027020271
Why would a junk bond trader and hedge fund billionaire be interested in owning a tabloid publisher which is in terminal decline…which it turns out had a vault full of dirt on Trump and others…?
Very nice work! And what excellent questions! For some reason these links make me think Bannon is somewhere behind this, as if he might have been a link between Pecker and Mercers’ money. How else would he come to know that Trump fixer Kasowitz had paid off more than a hundred women during the campaign? I can’t imagine Kasowitz telling him that.
As for the steep price tag on AMI 2X WaPo’s price: can’t begin to imagine what kind of kompromat vault Pecker has accumulated over the years. It alone could be worth a fortune. But I think some of the value is in user data. The people who frequent AMI content are likely Trump’s hardcore base, particularly white women. That’s the election margin right there and it’d be worth the price.
Welcome to emptywheel and thanks for delurking!
Yes BigJohnnyRed, seconded. Welcome and do comment more often. That one was superb and extremely interesting.
this is a very interesting but distressing story to me.
the politics i understand, though i consider it sleazy, unnecessary, and all too frequently unmet with insufficient counter-ferocity. one of the things i hold against secretary clinton is that she and her team simply would not fight back. i realize conventional wisdom is ignore it and don’t amplify it. i think you must fight back against “bad press”. you must do it not with “they say-i say”, but with an attack on the others’ motives and their fundamental arguments and behavior, i. e., republicans demonize women politicians routinely, bankrupt gov deliberately and thereby damage the economy, and leave ordinary citizens prey to corporate power thru their decades-old deregulation campaign. all the while mouthing their “values” platitudes.
it’s the “economics”, the business story, the attack on and weakening of new corporate leadership (compuworks’ founders) in favor of private equity leadership that troubles me a lot. when carl icahn started the raider game sometime in the ’80’s it seemed like a reasonable response to entrenched corporate management. since then i’ ve come to view it as largely predacious and no more helpful to rational management of corporations than directors who are incestuously related to management or each other.
i see everyday items whose names i know and which i use. i sometimes research their recent background when i sense something has gone awry with the product and find a private equity firm lurking.
diamond crystal brand products – salt. most recently owned by hormel brand. sold to peak rock capital. salt sense product apparently dropped. owned by imperial sugar before hormel bought it.
ames/truetemper hardware products – shovels, rakes, wheelbarrows. ames (and true temper) sold to griffon corporation, a private equity firm, in 2010. some ames name-branded metal products seem to be made of inferior steel.
fairly or not, i have come to think of private equity firms as predators who load a company with borowed debt and may dismember it at will. from a stock holding standpoint this may not be an issue, but from a consumer or employee standpoint it may be very serious.
i should say to rayne thanks so much for writing up this story. while it certainly is about politics and government, the bread and butter of the emptywheel weblog, it also raises important issues relating to the corporate/business heart of our economy which undergirds all our political activity. it seems to me that the behavior of corporations as they effect employees, retirees, consumers, science, regulation, and politics in this nation is vastly under-reported.
@orionATL re: https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/08/22/what-does-the-doomsday-investor-get-out-of-trump/#comment-747886
“one of the things i hold against secretary clinton is that she and her team simply would not fight back.”
Since the Clintons were/are considered by many to be the putative, de facto leaders of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, maybe they had an ulterior motive for “not fighting back” … against one who has given the elites their tax break, resulting in $180 billion in stock buybacks, a massive defense spending bill and now a record budget north of a trillion. Like Trump is a faux populist (aren’t they most all?), the Clinton’s are faux progressives IMHO, … working for a different team.
In any case, and more to this thread, I too find it interesting how the project that the Free Beacon, and apparently Singer started, got transposed to the Clinton camp, and along with Stormy seem to have given the key impeti to the investigations. Now Trump rails to his base that the free fruit of Beacon’s tree is really that of the Clinton’s. They play golf together and hang out at football games.
Is it too hard to imagine that the Steele Dossier/Fusion GPS/Free Beacon/Singer effort, and even the apocalyptic Stormy, might be convenient, plausible deniability vehicles to provide cover for certain interest groups? As such, why is the corporate (so-called Left) media shading its focus coverage to ‘obstruction’ (as noted by MW) and here: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/media-trump-russia-collusion-benefit-of-the-doubt.html
While Russian laundered money helped resurrect Trump from the financial ash heap, via such as Wilbur Ross, we can also thank NBC and Faux News Corp for colluding in re-establishing his specter.
BTW, Roger Morris’s “Partners in Power (1996) should be required reading for all Clinton fans. Morris was an NSC holdover from the LBJ administration, who quit the NSC over Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia and Laos.
hillary clinton was a wise, experienced and thoughtful politician who would have made an excellent president had she be been given the chance – better by far than, the lazy, indifferent, warring macho-man george bush; better by far than than the inexperienced, conflict-avoiding, unimaginative, moderate republican barrack obama; and better by far than the totally inexperienced, profoundly ignorant, incompetent by means of personality donald trump. in short, secretary clinton would have been the first truly competent president this nation had had since 2000 – that’s 20 years without a competent president. that’s twenty years to slowly lose economic vitality and to see the slow destruction of individual freedom as well the loss of opportunity for increasingly widespread economic prosperity.
@orionATL 8/26 11:39 am
Well, that is indeed the conventional wisdom … for Clinton apologists. Perversely, one dubious accomplishment of Trump is that he has rehabilitated, by comparison, the Bushes in the minds of many on the left, while lessening the Bushes in the minds of the Trumpublicans, at least.
I will agree with you that Hillary looks far better “by comparison” … but mostly on the surface, and also allowing that Hillary would not be behaving typologically like the berserk Samson of the Old Testament. On the other hand, she does seem to have the tendency to prove to the good ol’ boys that she has the cajones to do more than rattle the sabers at others. That both Clintons are better technocrats than most pols is no question, and the comparison to the stumblebum ‘businessman’ Trump is a absurdity. But, at the end of the day, the Clinton’s seem to know that their real master is the spigot of corporate green, not much different than Trump, or Obama, or the Bushes, or …
I have long since stopped playing the game of looking at things through the red/blue dialectic prism, but the real game is divided up differently. In Rome on the Potomac, the game is to subvert the top of both parties while convincing the plebes and below that the surface game is what really matters yet.
If Hillary is so competent (and she is) then why is there a book out (the title escapes me) that discusses that she refused to listen to her campaign team. Everyone in national politics knows the significance of swing states, and she lost because of a few ten thousands of votes in just 3 ‘swing’ states. Thank you the slave era legacy of the Electoral College. Nobody else’s votes mattered, exept to Trump that is.
As such, you should be asking yourself if Hillary fell on her saber, and took one for Rome. $100 million+ is a nice payoff in my ledger. That sure beats turning a $1K investment in the commodities market into an even $100K. Sounds kinda Manafortian to me.
To keep OT, I wonder if Jackson Stephens knew Paul Singer? He sure knew the Clintons and the Bushes.
Why doesn’t the Reply function work?