Private equity is no reform movement
From the piece: "New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, who’s spent decades covering finance for Fortune, theTimes, and other publications, and is nobody’s idea of a left-wing ideologue, described private equitysomewhat differently in a January appearance on the Daily Show:
Financial engineering is at the heart of what Wall Street now does, what it has become. And private equity firms, [one] of which Mr. Romney ran for quite a while, are at the heart of that. They buy up companies—that’s the investment—they fiddle around with them, they borrow against them, they lay off workers quite often, they pull out money for their fees, and then they bring them back to public market, and if everything goes well they make a fortune, and if everything doesn’t go well, the company goes bankrupt and they still make a fortune because they’ve taken it all on fees."
