Bankruptcy in the name of efficiency

Government, these books say, has been remarkably supportive of an industry that has helped hasten downward mobility and widen economic inequality

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.