American workers are facing a double whammy here: they’re losing access to private equity at exactly the point in time where private equity is becoming a very large and important part of the international capital markets. Meanwhile, it’s the rich foreign clients of Goldman Sachs — the global rentier class — who are getting that coveted access to equity in Facebook.
The two separate whammies here are:
- The fact that fewer companies are going public, opting instead to finance themselves through private equity and trading their shares via investment banks who set up private exchanges to match well-heeled buyers and sellers. Ordinary schmoes like you and me don’t have the opportunity to invest in companies that do this.
- The steady decline of defined-benefit pension plans, which were managed by professionals who had access to a wide variety of investment opportunities, and the accompanying rise of defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s, which are managed by ordinary schmoes like you and me who have access to a very limited range of standard investment funds.
In other words, you and I don’t get to invest in Facebook. Only rich people with access to the special private exchange set up by Goldman Sachs get to do that. And if this trend continues, you and I won’t be able to invest in any of the hottest companies of the future. Only rich people and big fund managers will be able to do that, which means that the returns on their retirement portfolios will be a whole lot higher than yours and mine. And that’s on top of the fact that their returns are already higher than ours, thanks to their access to a wider range of hedge funds and investment vehicles.
Felix isn’t happy about this: “What we don’t want is a world where most companies are owned by a small group of global plutocrats, living off the labor of the rest of us. Much better that as many Americans as possible share in the prosperity of the country as a whole by being able to invest in the stock market.” Agreed — but like Felix, I don’t have any bright solutions to this. And who knows? Maybe this is just the flavor of the day on Wall Street and the public stock market will make a comeback shortly. But the overall story of the past couple of decades has been the steady funneling of all the richest investment opportunities to a smaller and smaller class of the super rich, and this trend fits right in. It’s a problem worth thinking about.
