Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling financial
journalist Gretchen Morgenson and financial policy analyst Joshua Rosner
investigate the insidious world of private equity, revealing how it
leeches profits from everyday Americans, tanks the companies it
acquires, and puts our entire economic system at risk.
Much has been written about the widening gulf between rich and poor, the
pernicious effects our deepening income inequality has on the US's
well-being, and how our style of capitalism has failed to provide a
living wage for so many Americans. But nothing has fully detailed the
crucial role a small cohort of elite financiers has played in this
dispiriting outcome over the past thirty years. Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist and bestselling author Gretchen Morgenson, with coauthor
Joshua Rosner, unmask the small group of celebrated Wall Street
financiers, and their government enablers, who use excessive 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 America and private
equity's increasing dominance. Morgenson and Rosner investigate some of
the biggest names in private equity, exposing how they buy companies,
load them with debt, and then bleed them of assets and profits. All
while 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 because of the fees private equity extracts from their
investments. In other words: we are all worse off because 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.
