THESE ARE THE PLUNDERERS: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America
Author: Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 383
In These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America, by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, the arguments are about as subtle as a wrecking ball. It’s a measure of just how inflamed the rhetoric can be that when I arrived at the chapter called “Like When Hitler Invaded Poland in 1939,” I assumed the authors were the ones drawing the analogy. In addition to the “plunderers” of the title, their book is full of “money-spinners,” “buyout boys,” “pirates,” “pillagers” and “marauders”.
But it turned out that the line about Hitler’s invasion of Poland came from Stephen A Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity (PE) firms. He said it in 2010, in response to President Barack Obama’s proposal to eliminate a tax loophole that favoured billionaires. Some of the billionaire behaviour depicted in this book is so self-regarding and over-the-top — spending $3 million on a birthday party — that I have to admit the overheated language isn’t entirely out of step with the world the authors describe.
