Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America

PublicAffairs, May 2023

Summary: In Plunder, 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. The author 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, he reports. But, as Ballou reveals in an agenda for reining in the industry, private equity can be stopped from wreaking further havoc. Ballou, a special counsel at the Department of Justice, was part of the original team that brought suit in U.S. v. Google and leads work on private equity and interlocking directorates.

Praise: “Private equity firms must be reined in, argues federal prosecutor Ballou in his fiery debut … This must-read exposé shocks and unsettles.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Crisp prosecutorial delivery … Ballou also does an admirably clear job detailing how private equity firms use legal wrangling to their advantage.” —The New York Times

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