Fan-based Financing

Love the idea. Retail investors with an emotional connection to the team are not likely to be the most demanding source of capital

What if you could spend, say, $100,000 to become the owner of two seats behind the dugout in the new Yankee Stadium, due to be completed in 2009?

We are talking not about tickets, but about the seats themselves. They would be your property for as long as the Yankees play at the stadium. And with the sale of these seats, the Yankees would have raised the entire $1.2 billion needed to build the venue.

The Yankees organization, though, isn't the author of this deal.

It's Morgan Stanley and its partner, the start-up Stadium Capital Financing Group, who are behind the plan, and they’re hoping it will become an accepted way of doing business in sports.

Full article from Portfolio

Online Prayers to Jerusalem

The Cypriots modernizing fast!

NAZARETH, Israel (AP) -- Dressed in his embroidered robes, the Rev. Andreas Elime steps from the altar of St. Gabriel's Church and into the view of the Web cams on the church's marble pillars. His voice fills the empty 250-year-old sanctuary with a Greek Orthodox hymn, while a computer on a nearby pew transmits personal blessings to three Americans thousands of miles away.

Greek orthodox priest Andreas Elime prays near a laptop computer in the Basilica of the Annunciation in the northern Israeli town of Nazareth.

Christian pilgrims have long traveled to the boyhood town of Jesus to seek blessings. Now the Internet can save them the trip.

A service recently launched by Modefine Ltd., a Cyprus company, enables worshippers to log on and watch as a priest utters a prayer for them.

"This takes things to a new level," said James Martin, a Jesuit priest and associate editor of the Roman Catholic magazine America, who has watched religious trends develop on the Internet. Martin said in a telephone interview that the technology also gives believers a new way to carry out an old practice: asking others to pray for them in sacred place

Full link here

Why Private Equity Guys Are Rich And You're Not

From dealjournal.

You work hard. Are good at what you do. But you might be the first to admit it: Making big money is not the easiest thing in the world.

Unless.

Unless you happen to be part of a group of a few thousand who hold principal positions inside private-equity firms. A glimpse at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts's IPO filing shows just how breathtaking a business leveraged buyouts can truly be.

Last year KKR had expenses of $267 million. Its net income was a multiple of that € $1.12 billion.

There is a significant cost when a business has to expose to the world (customers, politicians, potential rivals) how incredibly profitable it is. That is why private equity was, well, private. We'll see how this plays out.

Kohlberg Kravis Is Back (1996)

From a WSJ 1996 article (link is behind the paid search feature). Looks so quaint. A mammoth fund:

KKR is harvesting big gains on sales of other companies it purchased in the 1980s, aggressively pursuing new investments and set to raise a mammoth new fund to rival the record $5.6 billion war chest it raised in 1987.

That can do $3B deals

So how can KKR wind up with the biggest war chest? What pension funds like is that they can invest a big wad of cash with KKR. And KKR, in turn, can do a $3 billion to $4 billion buyout, unlike most buyout firms. "Other funds create excellent returns, but we can't put the size and the amounts we want" at other buyout firms, says Jay Fewel, senior equity investment officer at Oregon state treasury, a longtime investor that is ponying up $800 million in the new fund.

And a different competitive set back then:

Thanks largely to RJR, KKR's returns appear to lag behind returns garnered by such fund groups as Forstmann Little & Co., Clayton Dubilier & Rice, Joseph Littlejohn & Levy, Morgan Stanley & Co.'s buyout group and others.