Private Equity at Work

When Wall Street Manages Main Street

By: Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt

Narrated by: Colleen Patrick

Private equity firms have long been at the center of public debates on the impact of the financial sector on Main Street companies. Are these firms financial innovators that save failing businesses or financial predators that bankrupt otherwise healthy companies and destroy jobs? The first comprehensive examination of this topic, Private Equity at Work provides a detailed yet accessible guide to this controversial business model. Economist Eileen Appelbaum and Professor Rosemary Batt carefully evaluate the evidence including original case studies and interviews, legal documents, bankruptcy proceedings, media coverage, and existing academic scholarship to demonstrate the effects of private equity on American businesses and workers. They document that while private equity firms have had positive effects on the operations and growth of small and mid-sized companies and in turning around failing companies, the interventions of private equity more often than not lead to significant negative consequences for many businesses and workers.

Prior research on private equity has focused almost exclusively on the financial performance of private equity funds and the returns to their investors. Private Equity at Work provides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers. In the 1980s, leveraged buyouts by private equity firms saw high returns and were widely considered the solution to corporate wastefulness and mismanagement. And since 2000, nearly 11,500 companies representing almost 8 million employees have been purchased by private equity firms.

©2014 Russell Sage Foundation (P)2014 Redwood Audiobooks

Agenda driven, bad narration

Picked this up after reading the several 5 star reviews. It the great words of Admiral Ackbar "It's a trap!" I am not sure those reviews are "arms length" if you know what I mean. Brian Probert's 3 star review seems to be the only objective one currently listed, though it seems he enjoyed it more than I could. My guess would be having the text so he could skip to the case studies is the cause for additional 2 stars. If you are unfamiliar with PE, this is certainly not a book that will give you a clear view. Writer clearly has agenda against PE. Book frames story and facts to fit this view. I really wanted to get through all the case studies but any illusion of an objective look was so quickly dispelled it seem pointless to push through. I prefer books with sufficient detail that will allow me to draw my own conclusion based on the facts rather than spoon fed a specific perspective.I hate to sound so harsh since I know most books represent an exorbitant amount of work by writers but I do feel like the banker who financed the Mervyns LBO. Misled and left with a worthless position on my books. Even more so I hate to be critical of the narration but the cadence had a robotic feel, occasionally abnormal pauses mid sentence.

Horrible book

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

The author, from the beginning of the book, has an agenda to misrepresent and bash private equity companies. She generalizes that all PE firms use leveraged buyouts to collect fees and bankrupt companies. Her bias comes through from page 1. I returned this book.

Bitter, biased, inaccurate

This is more a political pamphlet than a book. The author has an clear left-wing agenda. The number of errors and tilted information is remarkable. In the name of ideology, the author even tries to ridicule agency theory. The policies proposed to curb “egregious PE strategies” are simplistic to say the least, and grossly ignore the negative implications that a tighter labor regulation would have on employment. The author praises the stricter European regulation on PE, but fails to point out the much higher natural rate of unemployment prevalent in that continent.

Don’t buy this book if you're look for information on private equity.