Private Equity Has An Obama Connection
I'd like to introduce Anjan Mukherjee, a managing director at Blackstone Group (full bio below). He's also a member of Barack Obama's economic transition team, as co-lead of its Commodity Future Trading Commission Review process. The other co-lead is James Johnson, a white-collar criminal defense litigator with Debevoise & Plimpton. Mukherjee is on leave from Blackstone while he helps vet potential CFTC chief nominees. Any private equity FOB (Friend of Barack) can only be good news for the industry, although the CFTC regulates futures, which don't have much to do to with private equity. Unless, of course, you're a publicly traded, like Blackstone. And Blackstone isn't just a public investment firm. Similar to Fortress Investment Group, it's a public partnership rather than a corporation. That means it gets to be a publicly traded company but retain its private equity tax treatment on carried interest, unlike corporations.
