to be clear, PE isn't always purely extractive, but when it is, it can be highly destructive. sometimes a business is so mismanaged that debt (and the pressure it adds) and new management is all that is needed to right the ship.

PE itself is a bloated industry because we have too much money being extracted out of the real economy going into the pockets of the already wealthy who don't know what to do with it, so they hand it to a money manager (i.e., PE) to make more money for them, not knowing what to do with those potential future earnings either. this is the kind of economic inefficiency that concentrations of capital brings, in direct refutation of the common economic argument that the wealthy are better at investing money (i.e., more capital efficient, which in turn supposedly adds more real productivity to the economy).

small, local amounts of wealth are more capital efficient, but large, distant amounts are not.