Autorentext
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. 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.

Klappentext
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.

Zusammenfassung
New York Times bestselling financial journalists Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner investigate the shadowy and 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.

Leseprobe
Chapter One: “Pizza the Hut”: Leon Black and the Art of the Fleece CHAPTER ONE “Pizza the Hut” Leon Black and the Art of the Fleece
Katie Watson was a brown-eyed toddler in Phoenix, Arizona, beloved by her family for her sunny, easygoing ways. In 1982, when she was not yet two, Katie had become permanently brain damaged, after a local hospital failed to treat her pneumonia properly. Her parents, Vince and Sue Watson, received a medical malpractice award in a lawsuit against the hospital and, directed by the court, invested part of it in a guaranteed insurance company contract. The investment promised to deliver a monthly stream of income to Katie to cover expenses for her care.

That court overseeing the Watsons’ case steered them to buy a product issued by the Executive Life Insurance Company, then rated A+ for financial soundness—the highest grade an insurer could receive. Under the arrangement, known as a structured settlement, Executive Life, California’s largest insurer, contracted to pay $9,000 a month, with a cost-of-living adjustment, for as long as Katie lived. The funds would cover round-the-clock care for Katie at home, and after a trial and settlement with the hospital, the Watsons started receiving the insurer’s payments in 1986.

Four years later, Executive Life was teetering. Its investment portfolio had cratered amid a bond market meltdown, and the California insurance commissioner seized it in the spring of 1991. Then the commissioner sold the insurer’s investment portfolio in a virtual giveaway to a New York financier and his partners, claiming the deal would benefit policyholders. Not exactly: Katie’s “guaranteed” contract with Executive Life—and the payments it had promised—was no longer in force. Under the vastly reduced terms of the new post-takeover policy, her parents could not afford the costs of Katie’s care, expenses they would now have to shoulder themselves. Unable to pay the mortgage on their home, they lost it to foreclosure. Katie, who passed away in 2017, wound up receiving millions of dollars less than Executive Life had promised to pay for her care and support.

Executive Life had over three hundred thousand policyholders, many of whom relied on it for regular payments. Like Katie, these customers took a serious hit after the company was seized and its assets sold in a deal engineered by the New York financier. A 2008 audit of the deal by the state of California tallied policyholder losses at over $3 billion, a figure that is probably low.

Which New York titan of finance won control of Executive Life’s deeply discounted assets all those years ago? Leon Black, cofounder of Apollo Global Management and a billionaire many times over. Today he enjoys a sumptuous art collection, an array of palatial homes, and, until recently, a seat of power on the prestigious Museum of Modern Art board.

The multibillion-dollar bonanza known as Executive Life was the very birth of Black’s fortune. In 1991, when he snared it, Black’s new partnership, Apollo, had just been born. Running from the implosion of his former employer, a felonious brokerage firm known as Drexel Burnham Lambert, Black managed to wrangle the Executive Life assets on the cheap, for roughly 50 cents on the dollar.

Some called it “the deal of the century.” Later, the transaction would come under federal prosecutors’ scrutiny and Black would be named as a defendant in a California attorney general’s conspiracy suit related to it. But that case, alleging secret arrangements that cheated the state and Executive Life policyholders, was dismissed on a technicality—the judge ruled that the AG had no standing. Black walked away with his gains.

Thirty years later, the Executive Life transaction is long forgotten. In 2021, a California court approved the state insurance department’s request to destroy all documents detailing the failure, saying that the matter was closed because policyholders had finally received their last payouts. The document destructi…