These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America

Much has been written about the widening gulf between rich and poor, the pernicious effects our deepening income inequality has on america’s well-being, and how our style of capitalism has failed to provide a living wage for such a lot of Americans. But nothing has fully detailed the the most important role a small cohort of elite financiers has played in this dispiriting outcome over the past thirty years. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling creator Gretchen Morgenson, with coauthor Joshua Rosner, unmask the small group of celebrated Wall Street financiers, and their government enablers, who use over the top debt and dubious practices to undermine our nation’s economy for their own enrichment: private equity.

These are the Plunderers lucidly and maddeningly traces the thirty-year history of corporate takeovers in The us and private equity’s increasing dominance. Morgenson and Rosner investigate one of the crucial biggest names in private equity, exposing how they buy companies, load them with debt, and then bleed them of assets and profits. All at the same time as prosecutors and regulators stand idle.

Morgenson and Rosner show how companies absorbed by private equity have worse outcomes for everyone but the financiers: employees are more likely to lose their jobs or their benefits; companies are more likely to go bankrupt; patients are more likely to have higher healthcare costs; residents of nursing homes are more likely to die; towns struggle when private equity buys the main businesses, crippling the local economy; andschool teachers, firefighters, medical technicians, and other public workers are more likely to have lower returns on their pensions on account of the fees private equity extracts from their investments. In other words: we are all worse off on account of private equity.

These are the Plunderers exposes the greed and pillaging in private equity, revealing the many ways these billionaires have bled our economy, and, in turn, us.