Private Equity Doesn’t Actually Want to Kill the American Dream

There is a lot of the titular bad, intended and unintended, in Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream (Dey Street, June 10). There is the main charge: that private equity investors are bad, careless, pampered, unimaginative, extractive, faceless people who have “reshaped the American economy to serve [their] own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, their sense of security.” There is the bulk of the book’s content: well-researched stories, often heartbreaking, of people touched by four bad private-equity deals, all in shrinking industries or troubled situations. And there is the connective tissue: that private equity’s core business and source of power is thriving through failed investments in shrinking industries or troubled situations. This is Greenwell’s central thesis.

It doesn’t make much sense.