I just finished reading the new book Plunder during my eight hour plane flight. If you’re in the mood for a book to make you feel really angry and helpless, but have I got a beauty for you. This book, written by a Columbia (undergrad) and Stanford (law school) graduate who works at the Justice Department, lays out in tremendous detail how the utterly amoral private equity world exploits………

• Retail: laying waste to stores, ruining the lives of underpaid workers, and driving giant chains to bankruptcy;
• Housing: gobbling up houses on the cheap and renting them back to the working class under oppressive terms;
• Nursing Homes: cutting staff and supplies to a minimum, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of old people before their time;
• Health Care: likewise skimping on supplies, staff, and upkeep, leading to a degradation in care;
• Finance: taking over the spaces formerly occupied by the likes of Lehman and Goldman;
• Prisons: taking advantage of a literally captive audience, selling them overpriced phone calls, rotting, maggot-infested food, and overpriced junk from the commissary

I used to naively think that private equity was an industry built on optimizing businesses for eliminating inefficiencies, but “plunder” is a perfect word for it. If every single private equity organization on the planet was liquidated, the world would be a vastly, vastly better place. In the meanwhile, the most sinister among us are absolutely thriving.