These Are the Plunderers - by Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Amazing investigative work about a powerful but largely unknown segment of the American financial world."
--Investigative Reports & Editors

"Damning...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 policyholders 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."
--Publishers Weekly, *starred review*

"Readers will be drawn into the duo's storytelling, and even those who aren't financially savvy will be able to grasp the topic. It's a must-read for all for help in understanding a different side of capitalism."
--Booklist, *starred review*

"As Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner so lucidly explain, these 'modern privateers' simply act as dealers reshuffling marked cards in the deck of American capitalism. In the high stakes game they're playing, it's a deck that's stacked against the rest of us."
--Shelf Awareness

"The troubled story of private equity, which is anything but equitable.... A well-documented, maddening book that cries out for legislative reform and regulation."
--Kirkus Reviews

"A meticulous and devastating takedown of a powerful force in Western capitalism, infused with just the right amount of indignation at how the powerless bear most of the awful burden."
--Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound and The Everything Store

"This is the fourth estate working at its best: explaining to readers an ever-growing number of examples where private equity has extracted wealth, not created it, for the benefit of a privileged few. Done right, PE can play a positive role in our economy. Done wrong, its consequences are ruinous as demonstrated in this must-read book."
--Sheila Bair, former chair of the FDIC and author of New York Times bestseller Bull by the Horns

"These Are the Plunderers is a masterpiece of investigative journalism. Morgenson and Rosner expose nothing less than an organized, merciless, and astoundingly profitable attack on America's middle class. If you want to understand why Wall Street is booming, good jobs are disappearing, and venerable companies are collapsing, the story is all here. This book names the names and follows the money."
--Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of Kochland and The Lords of Easy Money

"A critical and urgent look behind the scenes at the characters and mechanics that increasingly dictate our systems of influence, power, and money. Morgenson and Rosner make the complex legible--and the stakes couldn't be higher."
--Mary Childs, co-host of NPR's "Planet Money" and author of The Bond King

"[A] definitive, inside story of how our winner-take-all economy came to be. The private equity billionaires you'll meet on these fascinating pages are the new robber barons. While the watchdogs were asleep, this investigative journalist and policy analyst show how they plundered America and, at last, hold them accountable. Ida Tarbell would sure be proud of them."
--Jill Abramson, author of Merchants of Truth and former executive editor of The New York Times

About the Author

Gretchen Morgenson is the senior financial reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit. A former stockbroker, she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her "trenchant and incisive" reporting on Wall Street. Previously at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, she and coauthor Joshua Rosner wrote the New York Times bestseller Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon about the mortgage crisis.

Joshua Rosner is managing director at independent research consultancy Graham Fisher and Co., advising regulators, policymakers, and institutional investors on banking and financial markets. He has been interviewed on PBS, CBS, NBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, and Fox News, and featured in or written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Economist, Barron's, and HuffPost. Joshua is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Reckless Endangerment with Gretchen Morgenson.