Pensions fund a significant part of PE and they do so because they need around a 7% return in order to look solvent. If they do not have the higher PE returns, they basically go out if cash in 10 years and everyone would scream bloody murder. But with the higher returns from PE they have 40-50 year runways and people can pretend everything is fine.

So PE firms exist to extract value from basically all high quality goods and services to show a high ROI to prop up pensions. They extract wealth by buying up companies and gutting the “extra” things in them - for luxury goods, it’s quality, customer service and warranties (like my venta humidifier or reformation dresses), for services it’s stripping the underlying excess risk management and quality control. One can argue that PEs make the business more efficient but in my opinion they just turn worker or consumer related benefits into profits (stakeholder and business benefits). It’s a transfer of value from worker and consumer to business and asset holders at a massive scale.

But sadly it’s not some evil dudes at the top doing this transfer, the market force behind it is because we promised old people way too aggressive paychecks when they retired. Pensions need to invest massive amounts of money into higher rates of return and PEs just happened to be the medium that is the most successful. Sure the people running the PE firm extract a ton of value drying up all luxury quality and robust services from the daily lives of working families, but their take home is a tiny fraction of the wealth they extract (but yes they take home a massive amount of wealth for an individual). Instead the wealth extracted shows up on a 1400$/m for some old person probably living in a retirement home somewhere.

So if you wanna fix or ban PE, solve pensions.

> The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus

A company doesn’t have to make billions per quarter to be solvent, it only needs to beat inflation. Beyond that, the people running the company should have some basic human decency. If they don’t, we as consumers, employees, founders, whatever can and should cease doing business with them.

In my area PE is gobbling up mom-and-pop apartment complexes, plumbing companies, restaurants, and generally making customers and employees alike pretty miserable.

Hard-working founders should be able to cash out, but there has to be a better system than this one. Succession, maybe. Not that we should push an unmysterious destiny on our children, but maybe more ought to consider pulling one?

Some modern economists have suggested this should work theoretically if properly implemented. See Helmut Creutz, Das Geld-Syndrom (1993) and “The Natural Rate of Interest Is Zero” — Mathew Forstater & Warren Mosler.

I (and leaders at my PE-owned company) cannot say enough bad things about private equity. How anyone who managed to make money in their life decides PE is a good investment blows my mind.

We are now on our 5th PE firm in 10 years, and just completed a "PE lifecycle" of buy -> merge -> sell -> part out -> merge.

None of these PE firms bring anything to the table. Even the hundreds of billions AUM giants. They have zero interest in tangibly improving the company, and lots of interest in cheap window dressings meant to fool other PE firms. Not that they could do much else, because it's mostly business grads with minimal real world exposure, and hunger to be rich above all else.

The most critical thing to understand is that they pay themselves "advisory and oversight fees" for the incredibly difficult work of increasing sales targets 300%. These fees can eat 10% of our revenue, and is one click above theft. Trust me, they will lay-off 75% of the company before even considering cutting back their personal take. Never mind the fees they take from investors too. They bill both sides.

Also, if they kill some of the companies they acquire, it's the investors loss. It is not their loss. They still collect all their fees just the same.

There is a total misalignment between investors and PE firms, where PE firms just want to maximize their looting while investors think they are actually trying to improve the acquired companies. If the invesotrs do see gains, it's mostly because the firm successfully conned another firm into overpaying.

Run from investing in PE, run as fast as you can. Recently they changed the law to allow regular people to have PE in their retirement. They are running out of useful idiots, and want access to the general public. DO NOT FALL FOR IT

Quote (from article) “This didn’t just happen to you accidentally. This is a business decision, isn’t it? You keep these backlogs like this. […] Another word for this would be a heist. This sounds to me like private equity came in; bought up all of these small companies; combined them; shut down their production; rolled up a huge backlog; massive profits; stiffed these guys; and now you’re making out like bandits.”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire...

PE funds seem a bit like the latest manifestation of the 80s corporate raiders to me.

The last part never made sense to be. Where do they find willing buyers for these debt laden, hollowed out husks?

This just seems wrong. The buyer takes out a loan, how does that become the responsibility of the company they purchased? I thought loans used to buy a business treated the business as collateral, like a home mortgage. What lender would participate in this? and why?

You can take the cash flow, take debt against the companies own cash flow to buy it, pay yourself back, consolidate, then raise the prices on a captive market.

2017 my city bought a Pierce ladder truck for $1.1M. The same-specced model that we ordered at the start of 2025 was $2M.

Our ambulance costs have gone from $250K to $250K. Engines from $400K to $800K.

And everything takes years - we're having to order multiple years ahead of time. Even a "simple" brush truck we waited for 30 months for delivery (and that's counting day 1 being "the day the Ford chassis was delivered to the factory for the brush truck build").

The UK high street has been a notable victim. Gradually, over the past couple of decades, company after company has been snapped up by PE. Not just shops, but restaurants too. Suddenly you realise that the 5 or 6 high street chains that were competing are now owned by the same fund. Quality collapses, prices rise, not just at one chain but everywhere. People stop going, the chain collapses, another empty unit, the fund moves on. It's easy to point at Amazon and internet shopping as having degraded the British high street, but there are several other factors, and PE is a big one.

What keeps a newly graduated Veterinarian from opening her own clinic and undercutting the PE competition? With no massive loans on her books, she can profitably offer lower prices than PE can. She may even drive the local PE clinic out of business.

Does anyone know about the source?

The new PE overlord will do things like send you a bill for inspection after you inquire about their pricing ("Well, our guy was in the area so he took a look!") while billing you for gas from their home location.

This is disgusting on so many levels—no competition here at all, just oppression by those with a lot of money.

Please edit out the AI-isms in your article. If you do, let me know and I’ll come back and read your thing.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

If it sounds substantial, it’s because it’s paraphrasing actual reporting, or it’s hallucinating. I found one of article it’s plagiarizing [1]. Other “articles” on the same site link to the real sources that the AI is regurgitating.

The topic is interesting and discussion is thoughtful, but I’m saddened to see it under a fake article like this.

[1]: The intro is an AI rewording of this: https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/12/08/burnout-fire-tru...

Another anecdote is private equity buying up psychologist firms providing therapy to people. The dude told me people walk in with their chat gipity transcripts. The goal of the PE firm was to buy out and make money and then somehow offer some software to give these people a "productive" chat gipity conversation

Just get the fuck out of here already? How many fingers up your own ass do you gotta have to keep up that kind of work?

1. No one forced these people to sell. Is the idea that you can’t sell to an entity with more money? If you block that good luck with the world economy.

2. If above is ok is the idea that the new owner is inherently worse because they have more money, whereas as the smaller would be OK then where are the new entrants?

3. Going to the article it is clear enough. These industries just are not lucrative to begin with. PE buys them and raises prices, but this only works because people complain instead of starting rival business.

4. Somehow leaving money on the table in the form of a backlog is bad? Why don’t others start a business and take those orders? Why don't they? Not profitable or worth the hassle.

Well there you go.

Separately, American manufacturing just seems very uncompetitive.

If you just keep gutting companies with leveraged buyouts, you're not taking on any real risk.

If you're buying up firms that deliver "essential services", you're likely engaging a monopoly. Again, low risk, high reward. A direct violation of the rules of how investments should work. Regulate the monopoly and this goes away.

It's a good thing that profit margins for manufacturing have increased, it's a bad that cities don't want to pay what a firetruck is worth in a post-industrial country.

Now they are buying fire stations, dentist offices, ski resorts, whatever the fuck they can think of and then raise the prices. Something needs to be done to stop this.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire...

> The result is a backlog that reads like a financial opportunity in earnings calls and a crisis in every fire station in the country. As of 2025, REV Group’s backlog stands at $4.5 billion. Wait times for a custom fire truck run to four years. Prices have doubled in a decade: a pumper truck now costs around $1 million; a ladder truck runs over $2 million. Profit margins in the industry have tripled — from the historic 4-to-5 percent range to over 13 percent.

The article goes on to talk about how a backlog is actually genius. Here's a quote from a senator:

> “This didn’t just happen to you accidentally. This is a business decision, isn’t it? You keep these backlogs like this. […] Another word for this would be a heist. This sounds to me like private equity came in; bought up all of these small companies; combined them; shut down their production; rolled up a huge backlog; massive profits; stiffed these guys; and now you’re making out like bandits.”

So you make money by ... not delivering? I'm missing something.

> The fire truck industry is the most publicly documented case, but the underlying playbook — acquire, consolidate, reduce supply, extract margin — appears across essential sectors with alarming consistency.

Sure, anyone can reduce supply and increase prices if they're a large enough supplier. But companies don't produce up to the point where marginal price is equal to marginal cost out of the goodness of their heart. It's the profit maximizing level. This is economics 101. The article doesn't even try to explain beyond hand waving. No one cares about profit margin, they care about maximizing profit, and you don't do that by creating backlogs. So something is off here and the author is either too incompetent to ask basic questions or just wants to write another PE bad article

Other examples not mentioned: eggs, kids athletics, I’ve heard stories in fintech services as well

> When a fire truck fails to deploy in a burning building and four people die, the cause isn’t just mechanical failure. It’s a business model.

leaves

There are other greed-based systems which also eat themselves, but we live in the era of capitalism as the vehicle of self-destruction.

Many of us won’t be alive to see it, but it will result in the fall of the US. Maybe it will be 50 years from now, but I suspect sooner.

Once enough safeguards get systematically removed, the rate of growth of the beast becomes unstoppable.

Eventually the few who have not been crushed and who have the (illusion of) control will have to wall themselves off in heavily guarded compounds to prevent the masses of desperate poor from overrunning them. It will be like so many dystopian stories that have already been written.

I see no way to correct it now, at least not in the US. Moneyed interests clearly have control of the government. The few good civil servants and elected officials are increasingly under pressure to give up their principles and accept pay-to-play, lest they lose their jobs or what little power they had to do good.

This isn’t just a right wing problem (US right), because the same money flows to the left. At the end of the day, one side may indeed be more cruel, but they both support the same system.