Plunder
Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
The “infuriating, illuminating, essential” (Kurt Anderson) exposé of private equity: what it is, how it kills businesses and jobs, how the government helps, and how we stop it
Private equity surrounds us. Firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR are among the largest employers in America and hold assets that rival those of small countries. Yet few understand what these firms are or how they work.
In Plunder, Brendan Ballou explains how private equity has reshaped American business by raising prices, reducing quality, cutting jobs, and shifting resources from productive to unproductive parts of the economy. Ballou vividly illustrates how many private equity firms buy up retailers, medical practices, prison services, nursing-home chains, and mobile-home parks, among other businesses, using little of their own money to do it and avoiding debt and liability for their actions. Forced to take on huge debts and pay extractive fees, companies purchased by private equity firms are often left bankrupt, or shells of their former selves, with consequences to communities that long depended on them.
Perhaps most startling is Ballou’s insight into how this is happening with the active support of various arms of the government. But, as Ballou reveals in an agenda for reining in the industry, private equity can be stopped from wreaking further havoc.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Private equity firms must be reined in, argues federal prosecutor Ballou in his fiery debut. He explains that the business model of such firms relies on using borrowed money to purchase companies and then making extreme demands of acquisitions to repay investors and turn a profit, often at the expense of the company's long-term viability. Detailing the strategies private equity uses to swiftly extract money from businesses, Ballou describes how Sun Capital bought Marsh Supermarkets in 2006, sold the properties the stores stood on, and then pushed the supermarket chain into bankruptcy to avoid having to pay employee pensions. The author highlights the human toll of corporate wrongdoing and tells the story of a woman who had to move out of the home she rented from a private equity firm after her young son was hospitalized for exposure to toxic mold that the company refused to acknowledge or treat. Hair-raising tales of cruel neglect in nursing homes, exploitative hikes in healthcare costs, and underwriting prisons for profit will turn stomachs, and Ballou's reform agenda is well considered and convincing, including recommendations to cap how much compensation executives can receive after layoffs and to ban the practice of forcing companies to pay dividends by taking on exorbitant debt. This must-read exposé shocks and unsettles.
Customer Reviews
Very good tempo
It’s like reading a thriller book, pretty exciting, each sentence. The author seems like someone that the government would search for because he knows too much about how the backend works. Fantastic book. I love it.