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Title details for These are the Plunderers by Gretchen Morgenson - Available

These are the Plunderers

How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America

by Gretchen Morgenson
Joshua Rosner
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
A Wall Street Journal Bestseller

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 in this "masterpiece of investigative journalism" (Christopher Leonard, bestselling author of Kochland)—revealing how it puts our entire economy and us at risk.
Much has been written about the widening gulf between rich and poor and how our style of capitalism has failed to provide a living wage for so many Americans. But nothing has fully detailed the outsized role a small cohort of elite financiers has played in this inequality. 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 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 idly by.

The authors 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 faster; towns struggle when private equity buys their main businesses, crippling the local economy; and school 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 is a "meticulous and devastating takedown of a powerful force in Western capitalism" (Brad Stone, bestselling author of Amazon Unbound) that exposes the greed and pillaging in private equity, revealing the many ways these billionaires have bled the economy, and, in turn, us.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 25, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781797158693
      • File size: 342469 KB
      • Duration: 11:53:28

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from April 17, 2023
      Morgenson, senior financial reporter for NBC News, and Rosner, a financial policy consultant, follow their 2011 collaboration, Reckless Endangerment, with a blistering critique of how private equity “extracts wealth from the many to enrich the few.” Damning case studies reveal how such firms as Apollo Global Management and the Blackstone Group have made billions by buying struggling enterprises and imposing drastic cost cutting to the detriment of customers and employees. The authors describe how in 2007, Apollo bought the Noranda smelting company in New Madrid, Mo., and forced it to take on hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to pay Apollo executives, cratering the region’s economy when the company shuttered under the weight of its debt. Detailing how firms stymie regulation, the authors trace how Blackstone funded a fake grassroots group that ran ads against legislation that would have reined in Blackstone’s practice of sending “surprise” medical bills to patients who used emergency rooms owned by the firm. Morgensen and Rosner excel at capturing the complex financial maneuverings in crisp, accessible prose, and horror stories about how buyouts shortchanged nursing home residents and life insurance policy holders drive home the callousness of the private equity business model. Fiery and incisive, this is an essential account of how Wall Street pilfers the pockets of ordinary Americans.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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