Word: firms
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...long run, that collaborativeness bolsters the firm's ability to do what it thinks is best for investors. Consider the 1990s, when tech-stock valuations soared off the charts. Many value investors came under enormous pressure from shareholders and corporate parents to load up on ridiculously inflated stocks. David Hoeft, who covers technology stocks at Dodge & Cox and sits on the domestic-equities committee, recalls a very different experience. "Our job inside the firm got easier," he says. "We trimmed as time went on. We just couldn't rationalize the expectations." No finger pointing. No pressure from the boss...
Forward to 2007. "Now the world is booming, credit demand in Asia is rising, and you don't need the U.S. consumer to be the spender of last resort," says Robert J. Barbera, chief economist at the brokerage firm ITG. The world economy is in its fifth year of nearly 5% growth. But the U.S. is no longer leading. Foreign financial markets are booming and pulling in money. Rising commodity prices are complicating the Fed's inflation-fighting job. As a result, the U.S. consumer can no longer count on a steady flow of low-interest debt...
That's one reason some private-equity players are going public, such as Blackstone Group and Fortress Investment Group. Others are resorting to deal jumping--busting in on another firm's deal with a higher bid, as Filmore Capital Partners did to Formation Capital in the Genesis Healthcare takeout. "There has never been a buyout market that has been this frothy," says Thomas Roberts, partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a leading mergers and acquisitions (M&A) law firm. "[The cycle] looks like...
...Ripplewood in the Maytag contest, or Building Materials Corp. of America's attempt to bust up the Carlyle Group's buyout of ElkCorp. For PE investors deal jumping was considered a faux pas. "It has long been suspected that there is an unwritten gentleman's agreement among private-equity firms to refrain from jumping each other's deals," said Chris Young, director of M&A research at Institutional Shareholder Services, a highly regarded independent proxy-advisory firm...
Fueling the competition further are disgruntled mainstream investment funds, which have been egging on PE firms to deal jump. Some have become quite vocal and even threatened to vote their shares against a deal unless a bidder kicked in more money. One such firm is Cohen & Steers Inc., a nonactivist real estate investor, which publicly criticized Blackstone's original takeover offer for Equity Office as being ridiculously low. The firm's comments helped trigger the bidding war that ensued...