Another botch deal, another US$600m down

‘The govt of Singapore, well, they lost the most….over $600 million. It just went poof…. Tisman Speyer and BlackRock lost a lot of people a couple of billion dollars, walked away from it unscathed and went into the next deal without anyone calling them out on their colossal mistake….’ NPR.org

The deal was to buy a middle class housing estate, The Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in NY Manhattan, switch the land control tenants with new tenants paying market rentals. Pretty neat, pretty profits and pretty good deal. The deal was stopped by the courts and money of the investors went poof.

There must be many such good deals that are going around for clever investors to pick up, just like the rotten banks during the 2008 financial crisis. Many were great deals with great promises of big profits and were picked up quickly only to turn out as lemons. No free lunch. Too good to be true.

Thought such good deals will catch the laypeople on the streets, like the gold investment schemes where the returns are more or less guaranteed and in double digits. I am also looking for such good deals to invest my $2.

Did Singapore lose $600m? I don’t think so. Every botch deal a few hundred millions, how much can we afford to botch and botch? But then $600m is really peanuts compared to the tens of billions lost during the financial crisis. Ten of such bad deals only cost $6b and it will take 100 deals to hit $60b.