These Are the Plunderers

""Amazing investigative work about a powerful but largely unknown segment of the American financial world."" —Investigative Reports & Editors “Damning…Morgensen and Rosner excel at capturing the complex financial maneuverings in crisp, accessible prose, and horror stories about how buyouts shortchanged nursing home residents and life insurance policyholders drive home the callousness of the private equity business model. Fiery and incisive, this is an essential account of how Wall Street pilfers the pockets of ordinary Americans.” —Publishers Weekly, *starred review* “Readers will be drawn into the duo’s storytelling, and even those who aren’t financially savvy will be able to grasp the topic. It’s a must-read for all for help in understanding a different side of capitalism.” —Booklist, *starred review* “As Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner so lucidly explain, these ‘modern privateers’ simply act as dealers reshuffling marked cards in the deck of American capitalism. In the high stakes game they're playing, it's a deck that's stacked against the rest of us.” —Shelf Awareness “The troubled story of private equity, which is anything but equitable…. A well-documented, maddening book that cries out for legislative reform and regulation.” —Kirkus Reviews “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