More wonderful and weird tidings: Bain Capital, the brainiac Boston buyout fund, has hired salvage consultancy AlixPartners to extricate any remaining value from its bankrupt buy-out, Outback Steakhouse Incorporated. Outback is the originator of mega-calorie Blooming Onion, and is apparently too many calories for Bain, as the company reported a quarterly loss of a whopping $750 million. Big grocery chain The Kroger Company (NYS: KR) reported strong earnings. That's the good news. The bad news? Growth was fueled by record growth in purchases by customers of its private label goods, which rose to a stunning 35% of total store purchases. Not only cat food, but white label cat food for the recession, people.
Over at George Washington's Blog, we have some interesting analysis on how/why pension funds are going broke: because they bought and sold highly risky CDS contracts along with large tranches of volatile commodities and other volatile, less than liquid investments. Pension funds will likely come under increased scrutiny going forward.
Alex Salkever is Director of Research at Piqqem.com, a stock research and investment community powered by the Wisdom of Crowds.
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