This is a story about what some people call piracy. These people with only dollar signs as their goal plundered something really wonderful. And where is this so-called piracy happening? It's everywhere. It is possibly your kid's schools could be your employer.
could be the mortgage on your house, missile defense systems, it's everywhere. The people who run these operations say they're misunderstood in that what they're doing is good for society. Others disagree. I suppose if I thought that it was good for society, I wouldn't have called the book Plunder. Today on Freakonomics Radio, the rise and rise of the private equity industry.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Steven Dubner.
Okay, our first guest today has an interesting job. My name is Brennan Boulou, and I'm a special counsel at the Department of Justice. Boulou is a prosecutor in the antitrust division of the DOJ. A few years back, he noticed something. When companies propose to buy big companies, they have to file documents with the Department of Justice antitrust division.
and with the FTC. I was looking at those documents and I was seeing all these acquisitions that were coming in and they were all companies that are being bought by institutions that I had never heard of like Blackstone, Carlisle, KKR, Apollo. I'd never heard of these. And so I started looking into it and started to learn about the idea of private equity and suddenly I realized that they're buying up everything.
And that got me interested in the idea of this book project, which I started putting together in quarantine. Baloo's book project has since become an actual book, which he makes clear does not represent the views of his employer. The book is called plunder private equities plan to pillage America.
The basic business model of private equity is very straightforward. Private equity firms take a little bit of their own money, some of investors' money, and a whole lot of borrowed money to buy up companies. They then try to make financial or operational improvements and then flip the company, hopefully for a profit, a few years later.
So we've been doing occasional episodes on the show about private equity over the last several years, often the downsides, not exclusively. We recently ran a two-part series on how private equity firms have been buying up veterinary and other pet care facilities. Now, I have several friends and acquaintances who work in private equity and they complain to me,
that I've been alarmist and that the negative associations with private equity are overstated. Of course, it's in their interest to say that. But when I listened to their explanations, these are nice, pro-social, well-educated people who don't beat their children or anything like that, I thought, well, maybe they're right. Maybe I am becoming a little bit hyper about it or paranoid or panicked.
And then Brandon, I read your book and I thought, oh my, I'm not nearly paranoid enough. So let me hear just a sort of opening statement from you about the state of private equity in the US. So we already described what private equity is or what the business model is. Let me try to lay out what the basic problem with that business model is.
There are three issues with it. First is that private equity firms tend to buy companies and hold them only for a few years. Second is that they tend to load the companies up they buy with a lot of debt, and then they extract a lot of transaction and management fees from the company. And then the third thing is they tend to be insulated financially and legally from the consequences of their actions. When the portfolio firm does something illegal or does something wrong, the private equity firm itself is rarely held liable.
What this means is when you've got short-term thinking, when you've got a lot of debt, a lot of fees, and we've got insulation from responsibility, at least to all sorts of bad consequences. And you were talking about the series that you've been doing on veterinary clinics. Well, my girlfriend actually is a veterinarian. And she's talking about all these private equity firms are buying up all the veterinary clinics in the area in which we live.
And it leads to, at least as alleged by her friends and folks that I know, leads to diminish quality of care for pets. It leads to increased prices. It leads to less flexibility for workers. And all of those are the sorts of things that happen when you own a business only for a few short years and you don't have responsibility for what happens in the long term.
Now, there's a particular argument in the vet care space. And one story that we heard after we published that series was from a lot of younger vets who say they would like to buy the practice from the founding vet, let's say of their practice, but they have such a big medical school debt that they can't afford to, and that the older vets, even though they'd like to sell the practice to the younger practitioners, they can't. And therefore, they end up getting enticed to cash out their business by selling to a private equity firm.
In a case like that, do you see any viable solutions? Well, for something like that, you know, student debt relief would make a whole lot of difference for young vets to be able to afford these things. Going back to my girlfriend, she's benefited tremendously from, you know, the pause on student loan repayments. The challenge is not that there's a lack of interest in owning these things is that the folks who have the money, who actually can own them, don't have the long-term interest in operating them.
As you're describing the problem or the potential problem with a pet care rollup, let's say how much of the problem as you see it is private equity per se versus consolidation generally. That's a great question. Consolidation.
is its own unique challenge. And the solution historically has been the antitrust laws. You can buy a business, you can buy a couple of businesses, but the more and more that you buy in a single product and geographic market, the more market power you obtain, and that gives you power to raise prices and to press pay and cut quality care and all these sorts of things. That's what the antitrust laws are designed to address.
You've got a particular challenge with the rollups that private equity firms execute in that a lot of them are with very small businesses. You then also have the problems of private equity compounding the challenges that rollups create, which is that a traditional company might buy another business with cash. Private equity firms do this with debt. They do it with debt that not them, but that the company they buy
takes on. And so what that means is you've got a business that's getting rolled up and so it's getting bigger and bigger and getting more market power. But oftentimes it's going to hold a lot more debt, which means that it's got to execute ever riskier, ever worse business tactics just to stay in business. What's the best way to think about private equity controlled firms as a share of the US economy?
So it's a little bit apples to oranges, but private equity in 2021 had $1.2 trillion in acquisitions. And the US GDP was about $25 trillion. That's not to say that it was 125th of the economy, but just to give you a relative sense of scale.
What about let's say private equity firm's portfolio company's employment size? So KKR, Blackstone, and Carlisle, the three largest private equity firms, each have roughly a half million employees or more. If you consider each firm's portfolio companies together, they would be the third, fourth, and fifth largest employers in America after only Walmart and Amazon.
You went to college at Columbia, New York, correct? Yep. Studied what? Studied philosophy. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. Okay, but then law school at Stanford Law, correct? Exactly. I'm guessing that between those two degrees that you have plenty of friends who work in private equity, is that the case? I have various friends who are in finance, and I think that they're all wonderful people.
My argument about private equity isn't about the people that are in the industry. It's about the business model. Don't people create business models? I think that's a question for a historian or a sociologist. Hey, you just told us your philosophy major.
No, it's a slightly different argument. Private equities, critics and defenders focus on the people that run private equity firms. For the people that support private equity, they're masters of the universe. For people that oppose them, they're cartoon villains. I would argue that that's strategically the wrong focus because it suggests that all you need to do is change the people and you change the business.
What I'm trying to explain is that the laws that we've created around this business model create incentives that lead to all sorts of disastrous outcomes. It's really extraordinary. I think that there are a few industries that have been more successful in pushing their agenda through every facet and lever of government.
private equity firms and investment firms have given something like $900 million to federal candidates since 1990. One of the things that I think people don't necessarily recognize or maybe they're inured to is the extraordinary extent to which private equity firms have been able to bring in the brightest lights of government into the industry. We're talking about
Secretary's estate, treasury, defense, a CIA director, several generals, former SEC chairs, SEC chairmen, speakers of the house. Two speakers of the house so far. And it's not just the bright light names of government that go into private equity. It's sort of the below the fold people as well. If you look at the lobbying disclosure forms of any of the large private equity firms, it's filled with
chiefs of staff legislative directors and it just means that when private equity approaches somebody in government it's often a friendly face and when somebody's thinking about maybe leaving government they've got a place that they can go to i find that most even pretty smart people i know who don't work near finance or private equity
Don't really have any sense of what private equity is. I don't want to say in the shadows, but certainly outside of the spotlight for a long time. Your book threatens to change that. Was that an intention? I confess that I did not know what private equity was probably until after I got this book deal. But explaining what private equity is is deliberately hard because private equity firms often obscure what they do.
most of your evidence in this book has been previously reported in places like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, many local newspapers, all of which you cite very generously, I have to say. In other words, for anyone who is wanted to see what's going on with private equity, the story's been out there for a while.
So tell me what you're adding to the story. The challenge that we've got is that these stories tend to be specific to an industry. So you hear about what private equity is doing in veterinary clinics. You hear about what they're doing in nursing homes. You hear about what they're doing in prison services or single family homes. The list can go on and on.
A lot of what will draw a private equity firm to a given company or to a given industry is stable and reliable cash flow because they're buying the company with debt so they need to be able to service the debt so they need some consistent money coming in the door. What I was trying to explain is that these stories are united by a common thread.
and that thread is the laws and regulations that shape private equity and that create their incentives. The example that I keep going to is Carlisle's acquisition of Manner Care. So the Carlisle group is a private equity firm, one of the largest, and it bought HCR Manner Care, which is the second largest nursing home chain in America. Carlisle bought the company with a lot of debt that Manner Care had to service. And as a result, they slashed staffing, health code violations spiked, complaints by residents rose.
Ultimately, at least one person died in Manner Care's care, a woman named Annie Sally, and when her family tried to sue Manner Care and Carlisle, a really interesting thing happened. In court filings, the private equity firm said, oh, no, no, we are not technically the owner of Manner Care.
We, in fact, merely advise a series of funds whose limited partners through a series of shell corporations ultimately own the assets of man or care. We're not the ones to blame here. Now, that's sort of a legal sleight of hand because in public statements, Carlisle had said it bought it. In effect, it seems to have had operational control over the nursing home, and it certainly loaded up the nursing home with all the debt that led to the kinds of consequences that resulted in Miss Sally's death.
But because of fairly obscure legal doctrines like piercing the corporate veil, they were able to get the case against it dismissed. And so what I hope that example shows is that there are lots of laws out there, lots of regulations that essentially give private equity firms operational control over the companies they buy, but very little responsibility when things go poorly.
In terms of making things so complicated that almost no one even government prosecutors can really figure out their organizations. It reminds me this old saying it might have been wc fields if you can't dazzle him with brilliance baffle them with bull.
I'm curious if that's a strategic move, the degree to which things are Byzantine. One of the private equity industry's great accomplishments is they've made their work seem so normal and so boring. I honestly think part of it's aesthetic, you know, that the folks that run private equity firms wear nice suits. They, you know, have tortoise shell glasses. They went to a lot of great schools and all these sorts of things.
I think that there's something about the private equity industry in that it's managed to present itself as so boring in a lot of ways or so opaque, that it's been more successful even than other financial firms. If you compare this to investment banks, which are highly regulated, either as banks or bank holding companies, which is not to say that those companies have not been successful sort of in a lobby enough, or I think generally people have failed to lay a glove on private equity.
The private equity industry has been dominated by American firms, and one of the industry's pioneers is named David Rubenstein. He was a co-founder of the Carlisle Group and was for many years its co-CEO. Rubenstein appears frequently in Brendan Baloo's book. We asked Rubenstein for an interview for this episode, but he declined. We asked more than 20 other private equity CEOs and partners, and they too declined.
But we did speak with Rubenstein back in 2018 for a series we called The Secret Life of a CEO. If you want to hear the full interview with Rubenstein, that's episode 322. I asked Brendan Baloo for his impressions of Rubenstein. The first is that I actually ran into him in a park once while I was in the middle of writing the book. It's a little bit like meeting a celebrity. I was sort of gobsmacked and I didn't know. I didn't know what to say to him. So what'd you say?
I didn't say anything. All I heard him say was $8 million as he was walking by somebody else. He's on his cell phone or he's just talking to himself. He was talking to an older woman, perhaps his wife or something like that. Rubenstein is a really interesting character. He's a striver who came up from working class Baltimore. He's phenomenally successful at building relationships with folks in politics and ultimately becomes
an advisor to president Jimmy Carter, I believe, at age 27. He has this sort of monk-like aura in the White House. He works harder than anyone, is incredibly dedicated to the president, and works on a huge range of topics. But ultimately, for him tragedy strikes, Carter isn't reelected, and he's sort of thrown into the wind and has to figure out what he's going to do with himself.
And he stumbles upon private equity and a particular sort of angle that has been phenomenally successful for him, which is finding and hiring ex-government officials to come work for them. Their first was former secretary of defense, Frank Carlucci. And they figure out that there's a real draw for investors to meet these government officials.
Now David Rubenstein has a reputation as a really good business person who has been around a long time and who in the last bunch of years has charitably used some of his personal billions to buy historical treasures that he then shares with the public rare copies of documents like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence and so on.
How do you view that? Is that just reputation laundering? Is that a fortune built from plunder? Or is that the well spent fortune of a man who worked hard and played by the rules? At the risk of being repetitive, I think that David Rubenstein personally is a very nice man. I've listened to a lot of interviews with him to try to get a sense of the person, and I instinctively like him.
He has a rye sense of humor that a lot of business executives don't. I think he has a self-awareness that I find very charming. I'm very impressed by the considerable donations he's made to a whole range of clauses. The challenge is that we've got some examples of Carlisle making its money by essentially eviscerating some of the companies that it buys.
Yeah, I want to ask you about the Plaza del Rey mobile home park in California that was a Carlisle investment. Can you give me that story quickly? So this is an area where private equity firms have been getting increasingly active is mobile homes. Carlisle bought the Plaza del Rey mobile home park in the Bay area outside of San Jose. And the park was something of a pocket of affordability in an otherwise unaffordable area of the country.
Now, the really important thing about the mobile home business model is mobile homes generally are not in fact mobile. They're sealed to the ground often with concrete and they're often the only source of wealth for the person that lives in them. So what'll happen is a person will buy a mobile home either with cash or with the mortgage and then they'll pay a lot fee for the park in which it's sitting.
Now, after Carlisle bought up Plaza del Rey, it dramatically hiked a lot fees to a level that was completely unaffordable for a lot of the residents. This had two effects for the residents. One, it increased how much that they had to pay every month.
to the owner and ultimately to Carlisle. At the same time, it eviscerated the equity that they had built up in their homes, because it meant that other people wouldn't be able to buy those homes, and it meant that they were taking not only the resident's income, but their wealth.
As Blue writes in plunder, this led the residents of Plaza del Rey to ask their city council to impose rent controls. And if you read the reporting on this and talk to the folks that were involved in this, there's a really tragic sense in which they're completely outgunned.
Carlisle's bringing in executives to these city council meetings explaining their positions. Meanwhile, the residents are collecting cans to try to afford a lawyer. There's a quote I think in the LA Times that they finally collected enough cans to have a third hour with a lawyer. This ultimately proved to be, at least according to public reporting, extremely profitable for Carlisle, which was able to sell the park for a significant profit to another investor just a few years later.
After the break, what happened when one of New York's most beloved, most distinctive grocery stores got the private equity treatment? This is Freakonomics Radio. I'm Stephen Dubner. We will be right back.
When I moved to New York City many years ago, I thought it was a ridiculous place to live. Too crowded, too chaotic, too expensive,
And then I found a grocery store called Fairway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Its slogan was like no other market. Fairway was also crowded and chaotic, but not very expensive, and it was wonderful. At least if you like food, which I did and do, it sounds crazy to say that one grocery store could make an entire city more livable, but Fairway did.
It was a dizzying, gorgeous cornucopia of like all these things, some of which you'd recognize, some of which you'd have absolutely no clue what you were looking at, like a million kinds of apples that I had never heard of before. For me, the cheese section was the soul of the place. There were 300 cheeses behind the counter. The olive oils were amazing and plentiful and a million kinds of vinegar and tins of
preserved fish. They were really pioneers at finding new things, finding things from around the world, finding people starting new food brands. That is Hannah Howard. She is a food writer who also fell in love with Fairway.
It really was its own thing. A lot of times when I start to talk about all the amazing food, people think something fancy and it was really the opposite of fancy. It was always busy. So we're in Manhattan and there's always like an angry grandmother with a shopping cart who is not shy about ramming over you.
And there was a sort of treasure hunt vibe where you never knew what you were going to discover. There were always these ropes of garlic and brussel sprouts before that was something I would see everywhere. When Howard graduated from college, she knew she somehow wanted to work with food. She tried the restaurant industry and didn't like it.
Yeah, I think it wasn't as creative as I hoped it would be. And at the time, I was doing a little bit of freelance writing, including a series about food entrepreneurs. And one of the people I interviewed was Stephen Jenkins, who was one of the VPs at Fairway Market. He was the cheese guy. He was waxing poetic about a lot of his journeys. You know, when you probably were visiting Fairway, it was newer to have
some of these cheeses, European cheeses, goodas, and the fresh mozzarella, and he was discovering them and smuggling them in his suitcase. And I just asked him, I was like, hey, are you guys hiring? This was in 2011. Howard did get hired by Fairway, and she started out at the cheese counter.
Then my timing was great because they were growing at this point. They had just been purchased by the private equity firm, Sterling. It was actually a few years earlier that Sterling investment partners based in Westport, Connecticut, had made a big investment in fairway. By then, fairway had already added a few locations beyond the original one and the goal was to become a big chain.
We were growing so fast and so short staff. So it was kind of like an all hands on deck all the time situation. They told us we have 10 stores now and we're going to have 15 stores next year and we're going to be like Whole Foods. We're going to be all around the country. We're going to be this huge brand synonymous with great food. And that was exciting and hopeful. Were you involved in the physical opening of new stores as well?
I was just because everyone was the whole team was I gave a lot of tours to bankers who were part of the IPO to show them around and explain what we were up to.
That's right, Sterling was planning an IPO, an initial public offering of fairway stock to recoup its investment. This was in 2013. So how did a single beloved chaotic food market on the Upper West Side turn into the epicenter of an IPO?
Okay, let's take a step back to the time before Fairway had taken on a private equity partner. The company was owned by three families. The key family, for the purpose of this story, is the Glickberg family, the founders. The Glickbergs were involved in that they were always around. Howie Glickberg was there, his son Dan Glickberg was there, and there was a lot of talk about if he was going to become the next
leader in the next face of the company. How would you describe the Glickbergs as business people, as keepers of this tradition and so on? They cared about the brand. They cared about their people. But I think there was also that famous grumpy New York gruff exterior. There was definitely nothing warm and fuzzy going on.
My god, my dad at his peak, like he would walk through a store and he would point at every single little thing that was wrong. Everybody in the business used to say, if Howie's not talking to you, that means you're doing a good job. And that is Howie's son, Dan Glickberg. I am a venture capital investor, former grocery guru. His father was the one who brought in sterling investment partners.
Yeah, so essentially what happened was there's three partners, three equal partners in the business. And one of the partners called up my dad one day. What my dad's partner told him was I'm moving down to South Carolina. You can send my checks down there from now on. The partner wanted not only to retire, but to cash out of the business.
My dad was always pretty risk averse. And he was definitely debt averse. So there was no way he was going to go to a bank and take out a loan to buy out his partner. So that's when they started having the discussions with private equity. And that's how Sterling Investment Partners in a deal valued at $150 million wound up with an 80% stake in Fairway.
The Glickburgs, who still owned around 10%, were running the day-to-day, but the day-to-day became much more complicated as they began opening new stores.
Sterling absolutely were not grocery operating experts. And the one thing I would say is that if you're going to get into a brick and mortar retail business like grocery that has extremely slim margins, you better have some experience or you better be able to go into your phone book and find some people that have a lot of experience.
Sterling followed the standard private equity playbook and had fairway take on even more debt beyond the debt from Sterling's initial investment in order to fund the expansion. I think when they went public, they had $200 million in debt, maybe more than $200 million in debt. The IPO was successful, especially for Sterling. They received nearly half of the new money.
Howie Glickberg also got a big check, and Dan Glickberg made some money too. But Dan Glickberg decided to leave Fairway just before the IPO. He thought they were headed for trouble.
One piece of evidence, fairway had negative same store sales. Negative same store sales are when your sales this year are lower than when they were the previous year. We were burning a ton of capital. We were probably still spending too much building out each individual store.
And all of those different pieces really brought us to bankruptcy because there was no way that we were ever going to be able to position the business in a way to stabilize it and then grow sales in order to pay off that debt. Fairway declared bankruptcy in 2016. By then, there were 15 stores. Sterling wound down its investment while Fairway kept operating under new ownership. But in 2020,
It declared bankruptcy again. Fairway market is now owned by Village Supermarket. There are four stores left.
They're serviceable places to buy some things that you might need, but they are no longer the site of like glory and excitement. That's Hannah Howard again. The old fairway is to the current fairway as let me think like.
The best live music you've ever been to versus the annoying toy that your baby has that plays a jingle. There is blame to go all around here. It's not blame on my family. It's not blame on management. It's not blame on our private equity partners. It's blame to everybody. Like, we screwed this up. We screwed it up.
All of us, we're just completely reactionary to any issue that popped up in the business rather than being proactive and saying, hey, here's how we're going to put systems in place. So how he doesn't have to walk through the stores and point out, hey, we have an inventory problem there. No price tags. Why is that employee just standing in the corner with his hat on backwards? Like we didn't have any management systems in place. I think from private equity perspective,
I think that they raised pricing way too much because that's the easy thing to do. They didn't have the right big picture either. It was really just a race to the bottom at that point. I think fundamentally, these people with just dollar signs as their goal plundered something really wonderful. A lot of people have blamed private equity. Very few people have blamed management.
And I think at the end of the day, what I really want to say is an apology. I want to apologize to our customers. I want to apologize to our employees who worked so hard to make the fairway experience what it was. And that's not an apology for me, right? It's really an apology for my family. And it's also an apology from our private equity partners because we've never said that.
We asked Sterling Investment Partners for a statement. They said, Sterling never sold any of its stock in Fairway following the IPO, and that Sterling did not even recover the full amount it had invested in Fairway. Additionally, they said, the firms sought to act responsibly and honorably throughout its involvement with Fairway, its employees, and customers.
After the break, a private equity insider on what the industry gets right and where it's going. Also, what is Brendan Belous' endgame? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.
Sachin Kajuria spent eight years at Apollo Global Management, one of the world's largest private equity firms. I was a partner before the IPO and invested for the flat-chip funds across private equity, distressed, across a couple of structures, working in a team of partners and other employees to deploy significant funds in different parts of the world. You know, a great experience.
These days, Kejoria is investing his own money, and he has written a book called 2 and 20, how the masters of private equity always win. 2 and 20 refers to how private equity firms get paid, a 2% fee on the assets they manage, and 20% of the investment profits.
From the title, it may seem as if Kajoria has come to bury the industry that made him rich, but that's not the case. I asked him to describe the mission of his book. The mission is first to make everyone aware that private equity is not alternative.
It is mainstream. It's everywhere. It is possibly your kids' schools might be owned by private equity. Could be your employer. Could be the mortgage on your house. Could be the road that you drive on. Could be the real estate you live in.
pet care, your dating app, if you like the movie Top Gun, you know, what are the fighter jet schools is owned by private equity. This is a $12 trillion industry today. And I think going forward in the 2030s, this could be a $20 trillion plus industry. That's assets under management that's unlevered. Add a little bit of leverage and you're talking tens of trillions of purchasing power.
People are going to have soon the choice about whether to invest in private equity and retail. Retail, meaning the way regular people invest, may be buying a mutual fund through their brokerage account or 401k. Most of the money that flows to private equity firms today comes from professionals and institutions like sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, university endowments,
Retail investors typically aren't allowed to invest in private equity, although the industry has been leaning on regulators to change those rules. Such a change would align nicely with Kaduri's mission. Everyone should be better educated about this.
because it's coming, if it's not already at your door. You know about Apple, you know about Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, consumer electronics and so on, you know all about that. You don't really know enough, probably as an individual.
about Blackstone, Carlisle, KKR, these are the giants of the industry. And you should, for a lot of people, it's still a very opaque industry. And when you have opacity or a lack of transparency or perceived lack of transparency, you have a lot of worry about what's really happening behind the curtain. Kajuri's main argument is that private equity firms are simply very good at making a lot of money.
Why? One key, he says, is a mastery of complexity. If you think about most of our modern lives, we're looking for simplification. Is there an app for this? I want the book that gives me five principles on how to run my life. It's actually the opposite in private investment. It's like, well, hang on a minute. What are people running from? What's just too hard? And hard can be defined in lots of ways.
This business is a good business, but a trip top, the management messed it up. Oh, my God, is it going to die? Oh, so much work. I don't know. Or this is a disruptive industry. Yeah, but is it just a fad? You know, is crypto coming? Is it going? Is it real? Oh, so much work. The world is melting down. There's a financial crisis. Oh, my God, this guy wants to buy an insurance company. What? But didn't an insurance company just go bust? I don't know. So much work in that lies value.
Complexity is a source of value with private investing.
So there's been quite a bit of academic research about the downstream effects of private equity investing, much of it negative on the employee side. There's research about wages, work conditions, about longevity once a private equity firm takes over a company. And then on the consumer side too, especially when we're talking about healthcare, which has become a big area for private equity, nursing homes, hospitals, doctors, practices on and on. Many of the outcomes there have also been argued to be significantly
negative. I would think that's a major concern for anyone, even if they are just a retiree looking for an investment, but I didn't read about any of that in your book. Why not? It was important in all the cases we looked at for them to be pretty much personal examples.
and happily I wasn't involved in any of the ones that you mentioned that had those downstream effects. If you look on Bloomberg, if you look on the business press, you'll find lots of articles about large public companies doing things in a way that they shouldn't, whether it's Amazon with wages or it's this hospital with this, that the other, you see lots. I think it's very important not to confuse the style of investing
with corporate behavior. Is there something intrinsic about private markets investing that does all these bad things? No. Is there something intrinsic about private investing that is vastly superior in all circumstances to public investing? No, of course not. And so I think you have to be a lot more nuanced than that and say, look, if the argument is we've found that in this, this and this deal,
that all happened to be private equity deals, these practices were happening that didn't benefit consumers, communities, that should not happen. But it should not happen not as a function of being a private equity investment, one hopes, but more as a matter of corporate life in the same way that whether you look at Enron or whether you look at AIG or whether you look at Lehman Brothers, none of these things are private equity.
And these things have caused enormous problems over the years. And so you've got to be pretty open about it and say, if you find a particular set of individuals or firms doing things they shouldn't do, of course, that shouldn't happen. And that should be addressed in the normal course of things. But I don't think it's the industry overall. I've never been in a meeting where somebody said, well, let's do that. It's good for us, but it's bad for somebody else. No way.
Sachin Kajuria makes a good argument here that plenty of firms misbehave and fail and crumble without private equity investments.
Brendan Baloo, the department of justice lawyer and author of Plunder, is not particularly sympathetic to this argument. There was a really interesting instance where a private equity firm bought up a restaurant chain, pushed it into bankruptcy, and ultimately was able to push off the pension obligations of the employees and retirees onto a quasi-government agency.
And when asked about this tactic, the co-founder of the private equity firm said simply, we don't make the rules. You write that roughly one in five large companies acquired through leveraged buyouts go bankrupt in a decade. This is vastly more than the roughly 2% of comparable companies not acquired by private equity firms that do. Can you explain why that happens so often? The advocates of the private equity industry would say that this is essentially inevitable, that private equity firms buy up
risky businesses with the hope of radically transforming them. So it's only natural that a higher percentage of these businesses fail.
Maybe, but a lot of private equity acquisitions happen with a lot of debt. Then on top of that, the private equity firms manage to extract fees from the company that they own. Management fees every quarter, every year for the privilege being owned by the private equity firm, dividend recapitalizations, which is the company essentially borrowing money to pay the private equity firm and its investors. There's also the magic of the sale leaseback, yes.
Yeah, if you live in the Midwest, you might have been familiar with Shopco, which was sort of a Walmart competitor, Sun Capital, a private equity firm bought up Shopco, and then required Shopco to sell all of its physical stores, and then lease the stores back in perpetuity. Now, you can see how that would make a lot of sense if you're a short-term investor. You get an initial pop of the sale.
but it's tough for the long-term investor because it used to have assets that it could rely on. Now it's saddled with these long-term lease obligations that it's going to have to pay. If I asked you to write a brief critique of your own book, what would that be? Private equity has resulted in thousands of successful deals for hundreds of fabulously successful companies, and Baloo fails to acknowledge or explain that success.
Okay, so why did you not explain that success more fully? My point is not that every private equity deal is a failure, not even the majority. The problem is that we've got a business model whose incentives drive extreme and ultimately bad outcomes.
Hopefully, this is a bit of a blueprint. There's a tremendous amount of expertise within the federal government on a whole range of issues, private equity is just one of them. So I'm hoping that this is a little bit of a blueprint for how we can get people who are really knowledgeable in government to talk publicly about these issues. In other words, blue is looking for Washington to regulate private equity much more aggressively.
The Securities and Exchange Commission did recently take one such step by announcing new rules designed to increase transparency, fairness, and accountability in how private equity firms report their activities. These rules didn't go nearly as far as SEC Chairman Gary Gensler was hoping for. Even so, Gensler's SEC is now being sued by the private equity industry for exceeding the Commission's statutory authority.
You can understand why the industry is pushing back against even this relatively minor regulation. They own the keys to a gigantic money-making machine getting bigger by the day.
And if it costs a few million dollars in legal and lobbying fees to keep it running, that might be their best investment yet. The industry also likes to argue that its form of investor-driven capitalism is what keeps the American economy so dynamic and that it would be dangerous to mess with this formula.
Brendan Blue doesn't buy that argument either. His book opens with a quote from the late Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis. We must break the money trust or the money trust will break us. Brandeis' concerns in the 1910s are
almost shockingly similar to the concerns that we've got now back then you had the great trusts the steel monopoly tobacco and sugar trust the railroad trust and as brandy says the money trust controlling whole vast wafts of industry he and others talk about the immiserating effects that this has on people whether it's employees dying working for the railroads wall there is to these fortunes have literal hunts for diamonds on their backyards
But Lewis Brandeis and others helped to lead the progressive movement that constrained the powers of the trust. He helped to create the Federal Trade Commission. There was a huge blossoming of popular progressive legislation that didn't destroy capitalism the slightest. What it did is it constrained the powers of the trust and made the economy far more productive and far more fair. Can you just name a couple other protections, especially worker protections that were invoked during that time?
It's kind of amazing. It's almost a to-do list for the modern era, whether it's talking about the first labor laws, the first environmental laws. I don't want to overstate the progress of that moment. The 1910s were also an era that was incredibly regressive racially. It's not a perfect guide, but it does have a certain rhyming quality for the present in that
I think that there is often a sense of people leap from thinking of private equity or our current political or financial condition as always as it is to a sense of despair that it can never be changed. I think Brandeis' era shows that it can be because it has been changed before.
And the avenues by which we do it are going to have to be a little creative. Yes, action can happen in Congress, but a lot of elected officials receive significant contributions from the industry as they receive from many other industries. What we can be thinking about in addition to action in Congress is what role can federal regulators take, whether we're talking about the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FTC, the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve,
But you get the sense that the private equity industry is very well positioned to fend off any significant regulatory reform. You remember the dream that Sachin Kajuria was promoting to get more retail investors like regular old 401k investors into the private equity market? Well, that dream is starting to look real.
So historically that has not happened because private equity firms have been concerned about getting sued for irresponsible investments. The government can and recently has largely insulated private equity firms from those sorts of lawsuits.
In 2020, the last administration issued a letter from the Department of Labor supported by the Securities and Exchange Commission that essentially said, with some caveats, if you are a 401k fund manager, it's okay for you to invest in private equity, and you cannot successfully be sued for that.
So this was, as I understand it, about a decade-long effort by the private equity industry to get access to 401K funds. Stephen Schwartzman, the head of Blackstone, said, I'm paraphrasing very slightly here. He said, in every person's life, you have to have a dream. And my dream is to get access to 401K funds. Has the money started flowing? As I understand it hasn't happened yet, but they are working very hard on it.
You said a minute ago that this was supported by the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission. The chair of the SEC at the time of that support was who? Jay Clayton. Jay Clayton now is the non-executive chairman of Apollo Global Management, which is one of the leading private equity firms. What do you expect the average person to think when they hear about that kind of daisy chain?
Clayton, I think he has a genuine belief that private equity firms have higher rates of return than ordinary investments, stocks and bonds and so forth. And therefore, it's good for the average investor to have access to that. That's the theory, right? Exactly.
And in reality, what's your view? Is this move more advantageous to the private equity industry on average than it is to the average investor? It's certainly the case that private equity firms can often benefit in a way that their own investors don't. I don't think that it's nefarious intent, but it is clear that private equity firms have just been extraordinarily successful in getting their way on these sorts of obscure regulatory issues.
If I could just ask you to say like, is private equity on balance good or bad for the operation of our society? How would you start to think about describing that? I suppose if I thought that it was good for society, I wouldn't have called the book Plunder. Sorry, I forgot to take my anti-obvious pills this morning.
That, again, was Brendan Bellu, and his book is called Plunder, Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America. Thanks to him, as well as to Sachin Kajuria, whose book is called Two and Twenty, How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win. Thanks also to Hannah Howard and Dan Glickberg for telling us the fairway story.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the private equity industry. Our email is radio at freekonomics.com. Coming up next time on the show, an inside look at another industry, but this one has not been keeping up with the times.
We need to rethink what we are doing everywhere because it is not working. The construction industry has a big problem. It's more expensive for everybody who lives in a house, drives over a bridge, every company that builds a factory,
every school board that builds a school. How the construction industry lost its mojo and how it might get it back. That's next time on the show. Also, keep your ears out for an upcoming bonus episode. It is a conversation I had with a famous NFL player, whose brother, an even more famous NFL player, happens to be dating the most famous woman in the world.
Oh yeah, those brothers played against each other in last year's Super Bowl, and this week they're playing against each other again. That's a bonus episode dropping soon. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too.
Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Ryan Kelly. Our staff also includes Alina Coleman, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Ripon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Julie Kanfer, Lyric Boudich, Morgan Levy, Neil Caruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app or at Freakonomics.com.
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