SEC vs private equity ripoffs

Personnel really are policy.

Like a lot of leftists, I’ve been profoundly disappointed and demoralized by the Biden administration’s unwillingness or incapacity to play hardball and get the “Biden Agenda” through Congress. But there is a ray of hope: some of Biden’s agency picks are astoundingly great and doing amazing work.

Take Gary Gensler, Biden’s SEC chair. Gensler is doing what no SEC chair before has dared to do: taking on the rotten, corrupt practices of the private equity sector, who rip off giant pension funds and trash the real economy, while making the ghouls who run them ridiculously rich.

Whenever I write about the private equity playbook, in which investor cash is used to buy up and debt-load productive companies, leaving behind drained, ruined husks, people always ask how this can possibly be profitable?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

Part of the story is the unbelievable favorable regulatory regime for PE. Not only does its leadership get to pocket trillions in profits that any other earner in America would have to pay tax on, they also get to operate with near-total opacity. The lack of any transparency requirement allows PE managers to skim billions for themselves, their firms and their cronies, often at the expense…