It isn’t the fault of private equity that banks make excessive loans against assets in a leveraged buyout. Banks (such as per the article, The Royal Bank of Scotland) have a duty to ensure that their loans are of properly assessed risk, and if the PE firm that wants to or has bought an asset does not look qualified to run it, then the banks should not be making the loans. Articles that keep casually dropping triggers like “[t]hey rubbed their hands together and said, 'Sooner or later, as the demand increases, the prices must go up'” are not seeking workable solutions but capitalizing on their ability to raise ire. It’s much more yet another article that does its best to paint a profit motive as an evil, completely ignoring that any endeavor that is not profitable is going to die sooner rather than later, and when it’s a government run endeavor then the taxpayers, who were completely uninvolved in the deicsions of where their money should be spent, are the ones left on the hook - HTF is that better?

> It isn’t the fault of private equity that banks make excessive loans against assets in a leveraged buyout

Credit lends. Equity owns. It’s absolutely the fault of the owners, first, if their business is fucking up. That’s why they lose their chips before the banks do.

We had a society that functioned. That people could live a life. We no longer have that due in part to private equity buying up retirement homes, dental offices, HVAC/plumber shops, doctor offices, funeral homes, etc, etc and restructuring them for optimal extraction.

When I deal with bob renting his house, we come from a kind of equal place. When I rent from XYZ agencies, there is no fair deal, there is their deal or no deal, designed to be as exploitive of me as possible. There is no coming to terms from somewhat equal place, there is only agreeing to corporates terms. The same with dental work. Getting a roof put on. The society we had didn't work that way in every transaction in life, and the society we have now doesn't really work for large swaths of society anymore.

Systems with no slack become brittle. In the case of modern society, that brittle aspect is people not able to afford to live and businesses so 'optimized' they can't afford to do their core businessing well, their workforce unable to themselves live, and their workforce pushed in a way that isn't sustainable long term, but since their owners have purchased large amounts of the competition the business is able to stumble along for a while. Until they get their exit by selling the unsustainable bundle to a retirement fund, with PE yet again destroying another aspect of what made society work in the past.