"Plunder" by Brendan Bailou is the most thorough, complete analysis of the scourge of private equity in America. Private equity firms essentially buy businesses to pilfer them of every cent that they can get their hands on and leave the business in ruin. Countless lives have been impacted by private equity's plunder of businesses in every industry. Whether it is through lost jobs, low quality medical care, or people dying in nursing homes, private equity's impacts on businesses impact us all. This book makes me nervous about how much further private equity will be allowed to proliferate without government regulation. I recommend this book!

This book is an absolute must-read! Brendan Ballou does a thorough job explaining what Private Equity is and how they operate -- imagine a vulture stripping the meat out of every business it encounters - causing mass job losses, unfunded pension plans, broken promises around severance agreements and prey on industries such as health care practices, nursing homes and prisons (among many others) where consumers don't have the political power to fight back. This book is very clearly outlined so a layperson can understand what this is and how it is done. We also learn how government policies and lobbying has enabled the free rein of these types of vultures :(or pirates to stick with the plunder analogy). I really appreciated that in the last chapters, he lays out what we can do about this as well as what government, institutional investors, and shareholders can do to expose these unsavory practices and fight back. I am recommending this book to others -- it has really opened my eyes!

Thank you to Netgalley and PublicAffairs for an ARC and I left this honest review voluntarily.

An incredibly well-researched book that provides thorough details on an industry that affects the lives of Americans so deeply, yet is secretive and not well understood by the public. I know firsthand how little information is available on PE transactions, fund and holding company structures, PE investors, and transaction structures.

Ballou first provides a concise overview of how PE firms and deals typically work, when PE first came on the scene, and who funds PE transactions. He then goes into detail on six major industries where PE has, over the past few decades, made drastic changes – often for the worse for the companies that get acquired, its employees, its customers, and other non-financial stakeholders. The industries he covers are housing, retail, nursing homes, health care, finance, and prisons – these chapters are quite depressing, as Ballou spends a lot of time on the human cost of these transactions, such as elderly nursing home residents who get grossly mistreated because of the time and money squeezed out of nursing home staff in the name of "operational efficiencies" or prison inmates who are basically put into modern-day slavery and nickel-and-dimed out of every basic necessity with no one to whistleblow since they are a "captive audience."

Ballou then covers how the justice system, Congress, and local governments aid and abet PE deals, made particularly egregious because all of these institutions are NOT given a fiduciary duty – they are supposed to be protecting constituents who are usually the ones most negatively impacted by private equity. And yet, these institutions are ones that ease regulation, find loopholes, and otherwise avoid anything that could jeopardize the PE titans that donate millions of dollars to campaigns every election cycle.

Finally, Ballou presents very concrete recommendations for what we can do to fix this. I really appreciated how he drew parallels with where we're at now - with many interconnected environmental, social, and political crises with few signs of things getting better - to other similar periods in history. Although there were some bleak comparisons (e.g., the US in 2023 is like Germany in 1933...), he hopes that the US in 2023 will end up being like the US in 1903. Although this was a notoriously horrific time for the majority of Americans: child labor, Black codes, voter suppression, mass worker deaths, no labor regulations, the growth of the elite class, robber barons, and more, it was the catalyst for Grange and Progressive reforms that give us some of the labor freedoms we have now, from weekends to eight hour days to child labor laws to freedom of association and more. The last chapter of the book outlines real, actionable things that we can do now to help get us to an inflection point where things will finally start looking up and benefitting people.

My one criticism of the book is that Ballou doesn't quite cover what makes PE attractive from a logical standpoint. From the way he describes the business model, actions, outcomes, and actors, it all seems like pure evil. Why would any investor want to participate in this? (OK, the cynical answer could be merely about returns, but is that really it?) More importantly, why would any company want to be acquired by PE? (Same answer, that they're struggling financially and don't have any other recourse?) I know that the vast majority of PE is extractive, but I also know that it's not all like that. He provides one example of PE gone right early in the book, and I would have liked to see that a little more, so that we can take a look at how firms and funds can do better within this existing business model. But perhaps Ballou's response is that they simply can't.

Thank you to Public Affairs for the ARC via Netgalley!

Plunder is an informative and easy to read about private equity, their tactics, and what we can do to stop them. Ballou dives deep into their tactics in different industries, how they screw over workers, and avoid liability. Overall, I definitely recommend this to anyone who reads political/current events nonfiction.

Very readable and extremely well researched/documented.
The language used in this book is pretty accessible so even if you're not familiar with the language of private equity/finances you should be able to understand what is being talked about without issues.
Through most of the book Ballou painstakingly details how the life of people are being influenced, sometimes to a ruinous or deadly extent by private equity's effort to monetize and profit from an ever-increasing number of aspects of day-to-day life often at the expense of any form of perennity or safety. I was especially impressed with the segment regarding seemingly successful businesses (Payless Shoe Source, Toy R Us…) driven into the ground by the extraction model of profit generation.
Through the different "industries" affected we can see how many activist groups such as tenant rights groups, patients' right groups and even prisoners' rights groups) could stand to benefit in working in tandem with each other to push for better regulations of private equity firms.
This book is both an exposé and a call to action, while a lot of similar work will leave the reader with a sense of inescapable impending doom with this one we are left with a pretty defined suggested path forward which includes all level of actors from the citizen activist to the lawmaker. This part in particular was a breath of fresh air.
People who are familiar with my reviews know that I love me a book with a lot of footnotes and references and this book made me very happy on that front.

Ballou brings a lot of experience and research to the mechanisms and effects of large private equity firms. Much of the book catalogs the incentives and the resulting problems for acquired companies and their employees—and in the field of healthcare, their patients/clients and families. At the end of the book (ironically, in Chapter 11) he gives solutions to prevent acquired enterprises’ bankruptcies and collapses. Some we can do but most that need regulatory and legislative efforts.

Though he painstakingly describes what’s happened in a few industries by the 800-pound gorillas of the private equity world (e.g. KKR, Blackstone), he attributes a lot of the consequences to malicious intent. I doubt this is the widespread case. Only insane people would sabotage their investment even if they’ve recovered their initial capital outlay. Also, reading this book, you’d think all private equity firms are “evil” and bad for companies, and society. Many investment firms are often prescribing to the hold, secure and grow acquisition model and then sell if the capital is needed elsewhere or there’s an obvious strategic buyer. Though Ballou highlights a few industries and regional markets where PE investments have been detrimental, many more industries have survived and thrived with PE infusions.