alt Hacker NewsIt's very popular on here to attack PE--which I'm not going to especially defend. But it's also the case that PE also tends to come in when a company is already troubled in some manner. One answer I guess, is just go out of business on your own which many companies do.
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Private Equity has been buying up vets in the UK and jacking up prices massively, causing all sorts of knock-on negative consequences. Vets in the UK were not failing before.
Unfortunately our competition authorities are toothless. Their proposed remedy is that vets will have to publish prices on their websites from now on. Woohoo.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8j3020kl04o
https://archive.ph/ikhpP (link to FT.com)
> But it's also the case that PE also tends to come in when a company is already troubled in some manner.
The problem is that PE also has a nasty habit of coming into a business that is marginally profitable but not spectacularly so, saddling it with giant amount of debt to vacuum up the cash flow, and killing the business.
There is nothing wrong with a sustainably profitable business. Investors, however, want returns from the lottery ticket that they fund.
> One answer I guess, is just go out of business on your own which many companies do
Yes. One of the genuine services (in an economics sense) PE provides is to do the dirty reputation-ruining cash-grab tricks that original founder/owners don't have the stomach for.