[Kathy]

I didn’t want to listen to it. The description of it, well, didn’t entice me. But I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, so I’ve gone through podcasts and audiobooks like crazy.

My fellow FIers, please – PLEASE! – read this book or listen to it. Why do I say this?

Mainly because I had a case in my court with a lawsuit against one of the companies mentioned in the book. My heart nearly stopped!!! NOW I understand the “why” of the lawsuit and its importance to MANY of us who:

– go to the doctor
– need hospital care
– take a pet to a vet
– go to the dentist
– have life insurance

– HAVE PENSIONS OR RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS
Now do you see the FI connection?
“Plunder” by Brendan Ballou

[Erin]

Private equity has ruined my field, dentistry. It’s really heart breaking.

[Mary]

Ok I looked up the book description: Private equity surrounds us. Firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR are among the largest employers in America and hold assets that rival those of small countries.

Yet few understand what these firms are or how they work.
In Plunder, Brendan Ballou explains how private equity has reshaped American business by raising prices, reducing quality, cutting jobs, and shifting resources from productive to unproductive parts of the economy.

Ballou vividly illustrates how many private equity firms buy up retailers, medical practices, prison services, nursing-home chains, and mobile-home parks, among other businesses, using little of their own money to do it and avoiding debt and liability for their actions.

Forced to take on huge debts and pay extractive fees, companies
purchased by private equity firms are often left bankrupt, or shells of their former selves, with consequences to communities that long depended on them.

Perhaps most startling is Ballou’s insight into how this is happening with the active support of various arms of the government.

But, as Ballou reveals in an agenda for reining in the industry, private equity can be stopped from wreaking further havoc.

[Hope]

What is your takeaway from the book? What will you do differently moving forward? Please and Thank you!

[Sonja]

Interesting. Will listen to this. How did it change the way you spend or invest your money?

[Stacy]

Government and business have been working together for a long time. What do you think covid was? It made a lot of people very wealthy, at your expense.

Listen to Rick Warren at the WEF years ago, and you’ll hear him make push to add “the church” into the government/business stranglehold.

[George]

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others have been critical of this for years but they can’t do anything by themselves and some states keep voting red.

[Katherine]

I had an HVAC guy here the other day and he said private equity is starting to move into HVAC as well.

[Author]

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