About the Book
Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling financial journalist Gretchen Morgenson and policy analyst Joshua Rosner investigate the insidious debt-laden world of private equity, revealing how it leeches profits from everyday Americans, tanks the companies it acquires, and puts our entire economic system at risk.Much has been written about the widening gulf between rich and poor, the pernicious effects our deepening income inequality has on the US'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 thirty years. Until now. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author Gretchen Morgenson, with coauthor Joshua Rosner, unmask 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. These are the Plunderers lucidly and maddeningly 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. Private equity relies on debt--and lots of it. Morgenson and Rosner show how companies absorbed by private equity have worse outcomes for everyone but the financiers: patients at private equity-owned nursing homes are more likely to die; companies owned by private equity are more likely to go bankrupt; healthcare costs are higher at private equity-owned operations; workers at private equity-owned companies across the nation are more likely to have their benefits and pensions slashed or lose their jobs; 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. You're worse off because of private equity. These are the Plunderers exposes the greed and pillaging in private equity, revealing the many ways these billionaires have bled our economy.
About the Author :
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. 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. Ed McBain's writing career has spanned almost five decades, from his first novel, The Blackboard Jungle, in 1954 to the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds to The Moment She was Gone. He is the first American ever to receive the Diamond Dagger, the British Crime Writers Association's highest award. He also holds the Mystery Writers of America's prestigious Grand Master Award. His most recent 87th Precinct novel was Money, Money, Money. Ed McBain, also known as Evan Hunter has lived in Weston, Connecticut with his wife Dragica for the last five years.
John Farris is the 2002 Horror Writers' Association Lifetime Achievement Award winner and the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers including, The Fury, When Michael Calls, Soon She Will Be Gone, and Phantom Nights. He lives near Atlanta, Georgia.
Lawrence Block, a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, is a many-time winner of the Anthony, Edgar and Shamus Awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany and Japan. He also received the British Crime Writers' Association's prestigious Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in crime writing. A Walk Among the Tombstones, one of the novels in his Matthew Scudder series, was adapted into a 2014 film starring Liam Neeson. The author of more than fifty books and numerous short stories, he is a devout New Yorker and an enthusiastic world traveler.
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co., accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 40 books and has become one of the world's most successful writers. Stephen lives in Maine and Florida with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. They are regular contributors to a number of charities including many libraries and have been honored locally for their philanthropic activities.
John Bedford Lloyd, a graduate of Yale's School of Drama, has appeared in a host of major motion pictures, including The Bourne Supremacy, Crossing Delancey, The Abyss, The Manchurian Candidate, and Philadelphia. His television credits include Suits, Pan Am, Law & Order, Spin City, and The West Wing. His critically-acclaimed audiobook narration includes reading for authors such as Michael Crichton, Nicholas Sparks, Paul Doiron, and Atul Gawande, among others. In reviewing Lloyd's performance in Better by Atul Gawande, AudioFile magazine declared, "John Bedford Lloyd's deep, rich voice delivers just the mix we look for in doctors--knowledgeable, authoritarian tones mixed with the warm, comforting style that characterizes a great bedside manner."
