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?