About the Book:

Private equity surrounds us. Firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR are among the largest employers in America and hold assets that rival those of small countries. Yet few understand what these firms are or how they work.

In Plunder, Brendan Ballou explains how private equity has reshaped American business by raising prices, reducing quality, cutting jobs, and shifting resources from productive to unproductive parts of the economy. Ballou vividly illustrates how many private equity firms buy up retailers, medical practices, prison services, nursing-home chains, and mobile-home parks, among other businesses, using little of their own money to do it and avoiding debt and liability for their actions. Forced to take on huge debts and pay extractive fees, companies purchased by private equity firms are often left bankrupt, or shells of their former selves, with consequences to communities that long depended on them.

“A powerful, maddening account of some of the chief drivers of inequality and immiseration in the world’s richest economy.” —Kirkus

“Private-equity firms don’t just transform our economy: they co-opt and compromise our government and our democracy. As few other people can, Ballou has shown how private equity has been so phenomenally successful in advancing its agenda at every level of government, and how government has been so tremendously solicitous of private equity. For anyone who wants to understand what’s happening in our economy and our democracy, Plunder is required reading.” —Russ Feingold, former senator & president of the American Constitution Society

About the Author:

Brendan Ballou is a federal prosecutor and served as Special Counsel for Private Equity in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Previously, he worked in private practice, and before that, in the National Security Division of the Justice Department, where he advised the White House on counterterrorism and other policies. He graduated from Columbia University and Stanford Law School.

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