Some of you know that I published my first novel earlier this year. Although it seems to have been well-received and well-reviewed, I’ve taken upon myself, for reasons I’m sure I’ll explain in months to come, a very extensive rework of its second half. I feel like a sculptor who labored for months on a marble elephant and then decided that it really should be a giraffe instead. It’s quite an undertaking, and in some ways harder than doing it the first time, but as the picture below indicates, my new outline for this sucker is quite extensive (plus, the project gives me something peaceful to do while I wait out this stupid bull market).

I just finished reading the new book Plunder during my eight hour plane flight. If you’re in the mood for a book to make you feel really angry and helpless, but have I got a beauty for you. This book, written by a Columbia (undergrad) and Stanford (law school) graduate who works at the Justice Department, lays out in tremendous detail how the utterly amoral private equity world exploits………

• Retail: laying waste to stores, ruining the lives of underpaid workers, and driving giant chains to bankruptcy;
• Housing: gobbling up houses on the cheap and renting them back to the working class under oppressive terms;
• Nursing Homes: cutting staff and supplies to a minimum, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of old people before their time;
• Health Care: likewise skimping on supplies, staff, and upkeep, leading to a degradation in care;
• Finance: taking over the spaces formerly occupied by the likes of Lehman and Goldman;
• Prisons: taking advantage of a literally captive audience, selling them overpriced phone calls, rotting, maggot-infested food, and overpriced junk from the commissary

I used to naively think that private equity was an industry built on optimizing businesses for eliminating inefficiencies, but “plunder” is a perfect word for it. If every single private equity organization on the planet was liquidated, the world would be a vastly, vastly better place. In the meanwhile, the most sinister among us are absolutely thriving.