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.
Praise for These are the Plunderers: A meticulous and devastating takedown of a powerful force in Western capitalism, infused with just the right amount of indignation at how the powerless bear most of the awful burden. -Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound and The Everything Store This is the fourth estate working at its best: explaining to readers an ever-growing number of examples where private equity has extracted wealth, not created it, for the benefit of a privileged few. Done right, PE can play a positive role in our economy. Done wrong, its consequences are ruinous as demonstrated in this must-read book. -Sheila Bair, former chair of the FDIC and author of New York Times bestseller Bull by the Horns These Are the Plunderers is a masterpiece of investigative journalism. Morgenson and Rosner expose nothing less than an organized, merciless, and astoundingly profitable attack on America's middle class. If you want to understand why Wall Street is booming, good jobs are disappearing, and venerable companies are collapsing, the story is all here. This book names the names and follows the money. -Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of Kochland and The Lords of Easy Money A critical and urgent look behind the scenes at the characters and mechanics that increasingly dictate our systems of influence, power, and money. Morgenson and Rosner make the complex legible-and the stakes couldn't be higher. -Mary Childs, co-host of NPR's Planet Money and author of The Bond King [A] definitive, inside story of how our winner-take-all economy came to be. The private equity billionaires you'll meet on these fascinating pages are the new robber barons. While the watchdogs were asleep, this investigative journalist and policy analyst show how they plundered America and, at last, hold them accountable. Ida Tarbell would sure be proud of them. -Jill Abramson, author of Merchants of Truth and former executive editor of The New York Times