Elizabeth Warren: Private Equity Guts Everything from Red Lobster to Hospitals

[Gaugamela]

The pump ‘n dump robber barons are like termites eating away the house from the inside until it collapses. These useless parasites will self-rationalize until they’ve killed the host, and then they’ll stick their blood-gored face in the wind, smelling out their new victims.

K-Mart, Sears, PayLess, ToysRUs. What happened to all these stores?

Private equity.

From Red Lobster to nursing homes and apartment complexes, here’s what happens: Private equity marches in, a few wealthy investors buy the outfit, load it up with debt, strip out the assets, and suck money out of it until it collapses.

Then, after thousands upon thousands of workers have been laid off, after pensions get raided, after stores close, those private equity firms walk away with their pockets stuffed with cash.

Over and over again, they buy up businesses doing just fine and run them into the ground. In fact, companies bought by private-equity firms are 10 times more likely to go bankrupt than those that aren’t.

[joanbarnes]

1. This began with Carl Ican looting TWA and showing the world how to do it.

[Submariner]

4. Then Mountain Meadows Mitt Romney

went to Harvard for an MBA to learn about the companies he was about to take down at Bannon & Co LLC (e.g., Toy 'R Us), and then went on to Harvard Law school to learn how to bob & weave through the financial regulatory system, to then suck a company dry of its assets and retirement/pension funds, while keeping himself out of jail.

His quiver of 5 magic underwear wearing sons have likely been trained to do the same, with a nice startup fund for their own Vulture Co, LLC courtesy of the pension funds from all the 20+ year vested employees at Toy'R Us and like companies. Because of the Romney-like thieves these people have lost their retirement savings.

Romney's quiver of cowards are the same shit stains that claimed that driving around the United States in his Dad's campaign bus, was the equivalent to supporting the country in military service, so they wouldn't have to end up in Iraq getting their snowflake heads blown off by some mormon-hating muslim.

I guess the vulture capitalists are lucky they haven't pissed off a guy named Luigi who shoots their kind in the back.

[Gaugamela]

5. Yep, the corporate raiders, Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, Ivan Boesky, etc., started it.

Back then it was widely seen as a scandal. Now it’s just business as usual.

[Simeon Salus]

2. Greed isn't good. Greed isn't right. Greed doesn't work.

Greed serves only the greedy.

Greed didn't save Teldar Paper or the USA.

[GiqueCee]

3. Private Equity...

... is a virulent cancer that has to be exterminated if America is to survive. Any Private Equity operatives with even a vestigial remnant of conscience or decency would be well advised to put some serious real estate between themselves and their former employers. Unless, of course, they want to spend their most productive years as the cellmate of a muscle-bound lifer who smells like the south end of a northbound goat.

[Silent Type]

6. Toyz-R-Us should have just closed when their debt was downgraded to junk. In stead, they remained in business

for another 5 years or so by turning to the only source left for financing-- private equity. Counties turn their hospitals over to PE when the county doesn't want to -- or can't -- fund them.

Private Equity is little more than a payday loan or loan shark, but somethimes that's needed even if the next to last step from ruin.

[twodogsbarking]

7. She is right ya know.