It's another world, watching the money go around!

Remember Enron?  Remember how it brought on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, for accounting reform and investor protection?   It looks like companies are fed up with those rules and are going private in droves.  When private, they don't have to tell anyone what they are doing, like how much their CEO's get paid. 

The International Herald Tribune says the world's largest private equity firm Blackstone, which was started 20 years ago for $400,000 and is now worth $32 billion is going public.  China is buying $3 billion in shares as they would rather buy our companies than our U.S Treasuries.  The founders are walking away with $2.3 billion of the $4.7 billion IPO and say that new investors will have to expect significant net losses for years. 

One of the owners only earned $213 million last year, so the $1.88 billion he gets from the sellout will help his retirement fund.  After all, the average pay of the 25 top hedge fund managers was more than twice that much last year - US$570 million each.   The AP reports that half of America's top execs at S&P 500 firms, make more than $8.3 million a year each.