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.
