Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner

"Much has been written about the widening gulf between rich and poor in the United States, the pernicious effects our deepening income inequality has on the nation'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 three decades. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author Gretchen Morgenson, with coauthor Joshua Rosner, unmasks the small group of celebrated Wall Street financiers who use excessive debt and dubious practices to undermine our nation's economy while enriching themselves: private equity. Private equity relies on debt-and lots of it. THE PLUNDER YEARS lucidly and maddeningly traces the thirty-year history of corporate takeovers in America and private equity's increasing dominance. Morgenson and Rosner, New York Times bestselling authors of RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT, investigate some of the biggest names in private equity, from Leon Black's Apollo to Stephen Schwarzman's Blackstone, exposing how they buy companies, load them with debt, then bleed them of assets and profits. These firms say they are saviors of troubled businesses, enhancing their operations to make them more efficient, better able to serve customers, and keep workers employed. But Morgenson and Rosner reveal how, with help from federal and state governments, private equity actually acquires healthy companies and funds the purchases-and their own instant repayments-with so much debt that it sickens the business. To meet the interest payments on the debt, the firms gut the acquired company through the sale of assets or businesses, then cut costs by laying off employees and reducing worker costs like healthcare and retirement benefits. After the financiers have extracted their profits, the companies often collapse in bankruptcy; in fact, fully 20% of companies taken over by private equity file for bankruptcy-10x the failure rate of other takeovers. Companies absorbed by private equity have worse outcomes for everyone but the financiers: patients are more likely to die; renters are more likely to be evicted; companies are more likely to go bankrupt; healthcare costs are higher at private equity-owned operations; private-equity backed newspapers are less likely to report on local issues, which leads to a decline in local election participation; retirees from private industry-as well as school teachers, firefighters, medical technicians, and other public workers-have lower returns on their pensions because of the fees private equity extracts from their investments. THE PLUNDERERS investigates the greed in private equity and how its predatory practices gut industries, paychecks, and worsen the lives of everyday people. With a keen eye and astounding reporting, Morgenson and Rosner detail the many ways these billionaires have plundered our economy"--