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As a concept? No. In practice? Also no. Crypto scammers take millions, private equity takes hundreds of billions. It hollows out entire industries; kills hundr
by mandmandam 2y ago
As a concept? No. In practice? Also no.
Crypto scammers take millions, private equity takes hundreds of billions. It hollows out entire industries; kills hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs. In PE funded nursing homes the mortality rate is 10% higher. PE owned hospitals raise prices by 20-30% while cutting staff.
PE firms pay lower tax rates (carried interest loophole), ie, they steal from everyone. A 2022 ProPublica investigation estimated that tax loopholes exploited by PE cost the U.S. government $180 billion annually in lost tax revenue.
'Dividend recapitalizations' have extracted hundreds of billions from businesses, often leading to their failure.
The estimated economic damage from PE is well over a trillion dollars; and I'd say that's extremely lowballed.
Crypto might be riddled with scammers from top to bottom, but there is real potential there; and even if there wasn't, it still wouldn't have a patch on private equity as far as "sketchiness".
- neilv 2y agoGood points. Would you say this is all PE, or only some?
- mandmandam 2y agoI can't speak for all PE. However, even their lauded 'success stories' - Hilton Hotels, AirBnb, Tesla etc - seem to generally turn out pretty evil. How can they not... The whole goal of PE is to extract value from workers and the Earth, and funnel it into the pockets of the .01%. This, in a world where inequality is stifling our potential as a species, and as a planet, on a truly unimaginable scale? Beyond the hype and the rationalizations, fundamentally, the investors always win and society always loses. They've turned our industries into a casino, and they're the house. Sometimes good people win in a casino, and sometimes they even get paid out, but it's a fucking mugs game that preys on our blind spots and is leading us into some very dark places.