Free Republic

We are facing an unprecedented global energy crunch. Demand for energy is continually rising, and the production of energy is not keeping pace. One of the biggest reasons for this is that large financial institutions have become extremely hesitant to fund any new energy projects that will add more carbon emissions to the environment. Instead, they want to fund projects that will help us transition to the new “green economy”, but meanwhile we are getting to a point where we will soon see widespread shortages of traditional forms of energy.So now we all get to suffer. A lack of oil...

The energy shortage is severe enough that it could cause a lot of unhappiness and social unrest, said Blackstone CEO, Stephen Schwarzman. Benchmark US oil futures are around $85 a barrel after surging about 75% year-to-date. Oil could rise to $100 a barrel, said BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. The global energy crisis is severe enough that it could fuel social unrest, said the CEO of asset management company Blackstone on Monday. Stephen Schwarzman was speaking at the Future Investment Initiative conference in Saudi Arabia. Schwarzman, who is also co-founder of the investment firm, said: "We're going to end up with...

Yet another overpriced 'starter-home' in the city I grew up in that recently sold at nearly 20% over the asking price... 830k for 1.8k sf. The house last sold for 300k in 2008. What's particularly sad is that Melrose was once a blue-collar middle class city in which the children of residents eagerly wished to remain. Prices have been on a tear since 2012, but they, like those everywhere else, have been accelerating rapidly since the plandemic. I would like to especially thank our clueless, arrogant, obnoxious elites at the Federal Reserve (yes, you JPow), the arrogant, entrenched executives at...

Genealogy websites have become increasingly popular in recent years. These platforms are able to scour the web in search of documents and archival data, which can help users build historically accurate family trees. There’s also another side to genealogy websites that has attracted attention from privacy advocates: DNA testing. Websites like Ancestry.com can use DNA testing to find matches, but the fact that these platforms store this information on their end means that hackers could try and steal it. Tap or click here to see how Ancestry.com suffered a huge data breach. Since genealogy websites collect so much data, their...

America's laws are largely derived from English Common Law. Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, published 1765-1769 by Oxford's Clarendon Press, articulated English Common Law in a way that powerfully influenced America's founders. Blackstone's work is considered the definitive pre-Revolutionary source of common law by United States courts. Blackstone wrote: "The principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature." Blackstone drew upon previous documents highlighting Creator-given rights, which then crystallized in America's Declaration of Independence. Historian Dr. Marshall Foster...

In March 2015 Stephen Schwarzman got a telephone call from JPMorgan vice chairman Jimmy Lee, one of Wall Street’s legendary power brokers. Lee, who died three months later, was helping General Electric GE -0.82% unload $30 billion in commercial real estate assets lingering on its books. GE boss Jeffrey Immelt was uncomfortable with the massive financial services business his predecessor, Jack Welch, had slowly built up. During the 2008 meltdown, frozen credit markets put GE Capital’s $101 billion in commercial paper funding in peril, bringing the mighty industrial conglomerate to its knees. Lee told Schwarzman that the real estate sale...

If you haven't taken it upon yourself to start saving for retirement, you could already be in trouble. Even worse, you could be part of a national crisis that's brewing under everyone's radars. In an earnings call Thursday, Blackstone president and COO Tony James articulated the problem and its origins. "I have the view that the hidden crisis in America that no one is talking about is what's going to happen with all of these 20, 30, 40-year-olds who no longer have corporate pension funds of defined benefit," he said. "So, they have got 401(k)s and they are making little...

Earlier this month, Deutsche Bank’s co-CEOs Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen were shown the door ... Jonathan Pollack, the bank’s global head commercial real estate, is leaving after 16 years. ... Pollack's departure comes just one month after the bank's head of structured finance Elad Shraga left to start his own fund. Shraga was instrumental in helping Deutsche become "an award-winning arranger of asset- and mortgage-backed debt." Shraga had been with Deutsche Bank for 15 years. All of this seems to lend credence to the idea that Deutsche Bank may be in trouble. The employee exodus appears to be gathering...

BLACKSTONE — Investigators found the remains of three infants inside a squalid, vermin-infested home here on Thursday, two weeks after child welfare officials removed four children from the same address to protect them from suspected abuse or neglect, authorities said. A woman identified as Erika Murray, a 31-year-old resident of the house, was arrested Thursday night and will be arraigned Friday on a witness intimidation charge, as well as additional unspecified charges stemming from living conditions in the residence, police and prosecutors said. Authorities would not say whether Murray is related to any of the children who had been living...

An odd fact: Under the common law, as reported by Blackstone’s Commentaries: [F]ull age in male or female is twenty one years, which age is completed on the day preceding the anniversary of a person’s birth. And here is the explanation from Edward Christian, who edited the 1803 edition of Blackstone, If he is born on the 1st of January, he is of age to do any legal act on the morning of the last day of December, though he may not have lived twenty-one years by nearly forty-eight hours: the reason assigned is, that in law there is no...

Ironically, despite making Mitt Romney’s former company Bain Capital and other private equity firms the target of its latest attack, the Obama campaign held a near-$36,000 per plate fundraising dinner at the home of Tony James, president of the nation’s largest private equity firm, Blackstone Group. Citing the president’s latest Romney-hit-piece, Glenn Beck blasted the hypocrisy shown by the president when it comes to private equity firms. Obama’s condemnation of private equity hinges on the familiar narrative that the industry is renown for commandeering companies and slashing jobs, leaving untold numbers jobless — which is why it is doubly ironic...

No sooner had President Obama released a "Bain Capital Video" which highlights the hatcheting job Mitt Romney did to poor performing companies, that he attended a high roller fundraiser at Black Stone Investment which awarded the President with a cool million bucks at the $36,000 a plate dinner. Note: Black Stone Capital has been responsible for firing untold thousands of workers through various "investment" programs. Here is a record of 800+ who were placed on the chopping block via Black Stone: IN THE TRENCHES How a Blackstone Deal Shook Up a Work Force Layoffs at Travelport, Dividend for Investors; 'On...

What do you get when you mix Democratic fat-cat donations, Big Labor favors, pharmaceutical lobbying and Beltway business as usual? Answer: another toxic half-billion-dollar Barack Obama-approved crony deal. Move over, Solyndra. Here comes Siga-Gate. This latest Chicago-style payoff on your dime involves a dubious smallpox drug backed by a liberal billionaire investor, along with a former union boss who was one of the White House's most frequent visitors. They're the "1 percent" with 100 percent immunity from the selectively outraged Occupier mobs that purport to oppose partisan government bailouts and handouts to privileged corporations. Ronald Perelman is the New York...

A Morgan Stanley property fund failed to make $3.3 billion in debt payments by a deadline on Friday, handing over the keys to a central Tokyo office building to Blackstone and other investors, the largest repayment failure of its kind in Japan. It marks the latest fallout from a series of highly leveraged investments by Morgan Stanley , one of the most aggressive investors in worldwide property markets before the global financial crisis. .. This is the largest repayment failure of debt packaged in CMBS in Japan

St. John of Damascuss Critique of Islam Webmaster note: The following passage is from Saint John’s monumental work, the Fount of Knowledge, part two entitled Heresies in Epitome: How They Began and Whence They Drew Their Origin. It is usually just cited as Heresies. The translator’s introduction points out that Fount of Knowledge is one of the most “important single works produced in the Greek patristic period,…offering as it does an extensive and lucid synthesis of the Greek theological science of the whole period. It is the first great Summa of theology to appear in either the East or the...

The NYPost is reporting that Blackstone's president, Tony James, is throwing a party at his house for Nancy Pelosi. Their sources tell the Post that the party is meant to encourage Pelosi to vote against the proposed tax rate increase on carried interest, the profits people make on money they have invested. Raising taxes on carried interest is a hot topic because carried interests isn't really income, but some people want to tax it as if it were. Currently carried interest is taxed at 15%. The proposed tax rate for carried interest is the same as the income tax rate,...

BOSTON (Reuters) - Taking his private equity firm public paid off big for Blackstone Group LP's Stephen Schwarzman, who became the top-paid chief executive in the United States last year, a title he is likely to retain for some time, according to an analysis released on Thursday. But the surest route to big bucks was running an oil or natural gas company. Their CEOs represented seven of the 10 highest-paid U.S. CEOs in 2008, according to a report by independent research group The Corporate Library. Schwarzman bumped Oracle Corp's Larry Ellison down to No. 2 on the list. They were...

"The rich are different from you and me," wrote Fitzgerald and I suppose they are, but the differences – they wax and wane with the economic tides. Gilded ages come, go, and are reborn on the monsoon cloudbursts of seemingly intangible forces such as globalization, innovation, and favorable tax policy. For the rich to be truly rich and multiply their numbers, they need help. Adept surfers they may be, but like all riders, the wealthy need a seventh wave that allows them to preen their skills and declare themselves masters of their own universe, if only for a moment in...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Blackstone Group said on Tuesday it would buy Hilton Hotels Corp. for about $26 billion in cash. Under terms of the deal, Blackstone will pay $47.50 for each Hilton share.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Private-equity giant Blackstone Partners, which is in the process of going public, found itself in the sights Thursday of the powerful Senate Finance Committee as top tax writers introduced legislation that would block publicly-traded private-equity and hedge funds from continuing to enjoy favorable tax treatment. The legislation would require publicly-traded partnerships to be treated as corporations for federal tax purposes. Under current law, income distributions for many private-equity funds are taxed at the capital-gains rates of 15% -- well below the top corporate tax rate of 35%. Blackstone, which is expected to hold its initial public offering...