Private equity
Brewdog raises £100m from American private equity firm
Brewdog, the independent Scottish brewery, has raised £100m from TSG Consumer Partners, the American private equity firm. In a message to shareholders on Saturday, the beer maker said TSG had acquired 22 per cent of the company. Brewdog said the transaction had given it a £1bn enterprise value.
Shed a tear for the poor, government-dependent British venture capitalist
British venture capitalists are worried Brexit could deprive them of European funds and are lobbying hard for the government to step in with compensatory tax-breaks. But what does this really say about the quality of VC investments?
The new boss looks awfully like the old boss, bitcoin edition
Bitcoin asset holders have discovered there is logic in taking risk with middlemen if it means idle (and highly volatile) zero yielding assets can be transformed into yielding securities. As a consequence, Bitcoin has gone full-circle and become exactly what it sought out to destroy.
Banks have a dubious business model and markets have noticed
The tendency toward restriction that runs through the tone of the presentation seems to me to be quite problematic. It seems to me to support a wide variety of misguided policy impulses. –Larry Summers, Jackson Hole 2005 You might think Summers had changed his mind in the eleven years since he called Raghuram Rajan a “Luddite” for daring to suggest the financial system had gotten riskier since the 1970s thanks to competition and the rise of performance-based pay. After all, in a new paper, Summers and graduate student Natasha Sarin not only cited Rajan’s work approvingly, they concluded lenders are still too vulnerable to panics. You would, however, be wrong.
