Doug Cornelius on compliance for private equity real estate
Private Equity, BAD!! Bad Company is an overly simplistic tale of capitalism. The author seems to equate private equity with Leveraged Buy-Outs. But that is just one business model. It’s true that the private equity capital stack uses more debt than public companies. That is also true of most privately-owned businesses. And most businesses are…
I know some people kick off their New Year’s resolutions with a plan to read more books. Here are few of my favorites from 2025. 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History–and How It Shattered a Nationby Andrew Ross Sorkin If you’ve enjoyed anything by Mr. Sorkin, you’ll certainly enjoy his latest book on the…
I’m a cyclist. I like cycling for my commute, fast rides, rides in the suburbs, fat biking in the snow. I like watching competitive cycling: men’s and women’s races. I watch more women’s racing because of Kathryn Bertine. Kathryn Bertine details her activism for equality with women’s cycling in Stand. It’s a memoir detailing the ups…
Every day is starting to feel like a Saturday: A ton of work to do, but I don’t have to go into the office tomorrow. A lot of my free reading time is consumed with trying to understand what is going on with the current pandemic. When I’ve had enough of that, I’ve been attacking…
There were massive problems at the schools in Atlanta. Funding problems choked schools from needed capital investments and programming dollars. There was pressure to perform well on standardized tests under the No Child Left Behind Law, with fewer resources. That pressure was too much for some principals and school teachers. They cheated and changed answers…
Jeffrey Lewis’s first novel is speculative fiction with a terrifying title: 2020 Commission Report on North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States. It’s attempting to give us hindsight about the future. Obviously, from the title, things go wrong. Very wrong. Mr. Lewis is expert on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. He is the Director…
Add Bad Blood to the top of your to-read list. Bad Blood tells the terrible story of Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. She took the Silicon Valley habit of vaporware and “fake it ’til you make it” to medical devices. The Theranos machines were unreliable, if they worked at all. Bad software will mess…
Lake Success will challenge you with an unlikable protagonist. Barry Cohen is an obscenely rich hedge fund manager who decides to leave his wife and autistic son to take a bus ride to reconnect with his college girlfriend. His travelling companion is a suitcase full of expensive watches. My favorite passage from the book: “Is it…
Can I outsmart the economist Steven Landsburg? I tried getting the answers right in his new book: Can You Outsmart an Economist? The answer: No. I can’t. Mr Landsburg’s book present us with 100+ puzzles to illustrate some principles of economics. The puzzles bleed into understanding the interpretation of those principles in statistics, law, math, science…
When I was a junior corporate lawyer, I sat in a debt training session. One of the partners mentioned LIBOR. The explanation confused me. But as a young lawyer I didn’t know very much about the workings of high finance. It turns out that the benchmark is hodgepodge of figures voluntarily submitted by banks with…