These Are the Plunderers

How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America

Gretchen Morgenson, Joshua Rosner

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781982191290
• eBook ISBN: 9781982191306
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Private Equity
• Index: Business

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction: “Money-Spinning Machines”: Let the Looting Begin
• A Note to Readers
• Chapter One: “Pizza the Hut”: Leon Black and the Art of the Fleece
• Chapter Two: “Greed Is Good”: The Plunderers Come for the American Middle Class
• Chapter Three: “Project Savior”: The Politician Who Gave Leon Black His Big Start
• Chapter Four: “I Really Need to Understand What You Do”: One Woman Against the Machine
• Chapter Five: “The Fire Sale Approach”: How One of the Greatest Giveaways Came About
• Chapter Six: “No Boy Scout”: Plunder’s Many Rewards
• Chapter Seven: “The Real Players”: Skating from the Crime Scene
• Chapter Eight: “Strong Enough to Stand On”: Savaging an American Powerhouse Called Samsonite
• Chapter Nine: “We Have 2,500 Families That Depend on Us Getting It Right”: Bleeding New Madrid, Missouri, Dry
• Chapter Ten: “Capitalism on Steroids”: No Lusher Target Than Healthcare
• Chapter Eleven: Call to Action Went Unheeded: Standing By While Corporations Practice Medicine
• Chapter Twelve: “Like When Hitler Invaded Poland in 1939”: A Special Tax Treatment That Mints Billionaires
• Chapter Thirteen: “Money for Nothing”: Investigators Home in on Fleecers’ Fees and Practices
• Chapter Fourteen: “Oppressing Indigenous People”: Bulldozing Through Our Wetlands
• Chapter Fifteen: “Hiding in the Background, Rarely Held to Account”: Mining for Medicare Gold
• Chapter Sixteen: “Special and Symbiotic”: Apollo Goes Back to Its Roots
• Chapter Seventeen: “No Evidence of Wrongdoing”: Leon Black Makes His Exit
• Conclusion: Who Will Stop the Bleeding?
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Notes
• Additional Reading
• Copyright