Bethany McLean
speaker
391 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Bethany McLean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I do think that these two incentives have combined in a really dangerous way, one being the one I just mentioned about private equity firms being publicly traded.
They have an incentive to put as much money to work as possible, which means doing deals where they may not be adding that much value.
The other thing that happened was that the decades of very, very low interest rates made it very efficient for private equity firms to add debt to deals that they were doing.
More debt than was really sustainable.
But it also separated private equities outcome from that of the underlying investment.
So the private equity firms, like in the case of this hospital company called Steward that ended up bankrupt a couple of years ago, they can actually make a great deal of money, hundreds of millions of dollars in the case of Steward, while the underlying company, in this case, a hospital chain that many people depended on, goes bankrupt.
And so that split is not what private equity was supposed to be.
old school private equity was we do well because the company does well.
And that makes a kind of sense.
It can be a brutal form of capitalism, but at least it's a win-win form of capitalism.
What I really dislike about modern private equity is that it can be a win-lose.
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