AZspot

Every time I read something that clearly explains how our lords of private equity play the game of “loading up a company with debt” as prelude to stripping what someone else has built for parts, I’m astonished anew. I can’t get over how a PE firm borrows money to buy a company, and that company, not Carlyle, has to pay it back—and that Carlyle gets paid to make them pay it back, in dividends and “management fees.” It’s hardly less surreal than the notion of the king personally possessing every whale and sturgeon in the kingdom for his own pleasure.

Matt Stoller describes private equity as a “political movement,” and I find that designation brilliant. Especially now, with Carlyle leading the industry into looting a basic human need, profiting from buying up vast tracts of apartment buildings that once had responsive landlords, and putting them under the control of faraway management firms that are not.