There has been a trend recently that when private equity firms take one of their portfolio companies public, they pay themselves a huge dividend before the IPO. Burger King is one example: a $367 million dividend was paid out to Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs and Texas Pacific Group. The dividend is usually funded [...]

Executive Summary
As of late 2006, it looks like Japan has finally put together a sustained recovery. It should benefit from economic reform and continued growth in Asia. 2006 was a sub-par year for Japanese equities, but by year-end they seemed to be gathering steam. Japanese PE ratios are still higher than many [...]