by Randall Lane Info
Randall Lane is editor at large at The Daily Beast. The former editor in chief of Trader Monthly, Dealmaker and P.O.V. magazines, and the former Washington bureau chief of Forbes, he is the author of The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane.
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For Steve Schwarzman, serving as last decade’s poster child for greed wasn’t enough. Randall Lane, author of The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane, on why his comments likening Wall Street taxes to the Nazis tee him up for an encore.
To understand how a billionaire private equity titan like Stephen Schwarzman can be so completely tone deaf—and policy ignorant—as to suggest that the idea of taxing Wall Street fat cats at the same rate as the rest of us is akin to the Nazi invasion of Poland, it’s instructive to follow him to lunch.
I met the deal world’s top dog midway through my first meal at America’s power commissary, Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant, where $53 Dover sole is served in two soaring dining rooms (the “grill room” and the “pool room”) connected by Pablo Picasso tapestries and Frank Stella paintings. En route to my noontime table, in prime bubble era, late 2006, I passed media power (Mel Karmazin, Edgar Bronfman Jr.), political power (Vernon Jordan, Michael Bloomberg) and Wall Street power (AIG’s Hank Greenberg, Citi’s Sandy Weill). But it was Blackstone’s Schwarzman, a near-daily regular, who acted like he owned the place, bounding from table to table, including mine, crowing about his ill-fated $39 billion bid for Equity Office Properties. I had entered his clubhouse, and by the look on his over-tanned face, which stood out against his salt-and-pepper comb-over, he clearly reveled in it.
People who bunker themselves solely among the like-minded, who forget what it’s like to eat a hot dog or a take a bus or answer their own phone, lose perspective. It happens in Washington and corporate boardrooms and Hollywood all the time. Yet one would think that the cataclysmic events of the past two years would have knocked some reality into the heads of Wall Street’s elite.
Especially Steve Schwarzman, the poster child for greed in the decade I call The Zeroes. On Feb. 13, 2007, he gained infamy by throwing himself a $3 million 60th birthday party, transforming the giant Park Avenue Armory into a replica of his 35-room Park Avenue palace in the sky, down to the replica paintings, and buying himself serenades from Patti LaBelle and Rod Stewart. "Steve, you're more than a friend to me," joked emcee Martin Short, "you're a business associate." Even in an age of excess, giving a $3 million birthday party prompted a huge backlash, one that he has since tried to distance himself from. (The following year, as if in penance he announced a $100 million gift to the New York Library, though a fight broke out over how many times his name would be chiseled onto the main branch's facade.)
Yet when President Obama, in an age of soaring deficits and 9.5 percent unemployment, makes an eminently reasonable proposal—close the tax loophole known as “carried interest” that lets the people who inflated the asset bubble pay a 15 percent tax rate, versus the 35 percent rate paid by most reading this article—Schwarzman trotted out the specter of the Nazis.
“It’s a war,” Schwarzman told members of a nonprofit board, comments Newsweek revealed on Monday. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
Watch Randall Lane discuss Steve Schwarzman and the Decade of Greed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe
Besides flubbing history—if we’re using awful Nazi metaphors, Obama’s dogged push on the carried interest loophole wasn’t a Poland-style sneak attack, but more of a sustained siege, à la Leningrad—Schwarzman is wrong on policy. So wrong that, among a half-dozen private equity players and money managers I previously asked about this, equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, not one, even with the cloak of anonymity, chose to defend why they are paying less than half the tax rate ordinary mortals do.
“Virtually everybody in the private equity community knows that they have been receiving a gift for as long as people can remember,” says one Schwarzman peer.
12 August 18, 2010 | 1:56am Twitter Emails
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Nero fiddling with no clothes as Rome burns. Oh yeah, lets extend the Bush tax cuts so the party can just keep rolling along for these "Titans" who are working so hard for the country they are selling down the river.
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I guess the Holocaust wasn't that big of a deal if it's comparable to closing a tax loophole....
As long as the subject has been raised, I wonder about is why so many of the villains of the financial meltdown have Jewish-sounding last names: Schwarzman, Maddoff, Blakenfein. It makes it seems like that particular religion is to greed what Islamists are to terrorism. Then it makes me wonder why Jews and Muslims hate each other since both seem intent on global domination by any means necessary.
Randall Lane, is a gentle soul . I could not write of treason & make it come out sounding like rationalizing the Nazi's & the Rape of the world ~ good story Randall
Scum floats to the top
THIS F=CKING GUT SHOULD BE HANGED RIGHT NEXT TO BUSH AND CHENEY !!!!!
No, no, isn't this the same guy who gave $100 million to New York Public Library. Handsome and public spirited. He made his money legitimately. Give him a break
"Those who defend it truly believe managing money is somehow more noble than what the rest of us do for a living-that their lower personal taxes are justified by the risks they take (with other people's money) to create growth and jobs." Above is the part that irks me, not to mention the fact that it turns out that the only wealth creation in their personal bank accounts. They really are just destroyers of everything around them. BFD copper...so the guy passed a few paltry nickels around to a good cause (who of us haven't made donations?), obviously chump change for a guy who can spend millions on a birthday party. Legitimate? They make the rules so OF COURSE this stealing is legitimate.
It would be funny if he choked to death on a chicken bone.
Steve is a huge douche, period.
He sounds like Marie Antoinette's Stockbroker, comparing his money to the lives of the Nazi's victims. Hope his rabbi sits him down for a "talk."
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