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Comment by N_Lens | Hacker News Reader

Private equity is a massive juicer that’ll try and squeeze money out of anything, destroying all the inherent value in the process.

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> destroying all the inherent value

Not all is destroyed. Some of the value is diverted to PE wallets. Setting 900k of someone else's value on fire in order to set up a updraft to push 100k into your pocket is a sweet, profitable deal for you.

I feel like this is the theme of our entire country at the moment: Many powerful people seem willing to torch stuff worth billions of dollars to the country as a whole in order to squeeze out a few million for themselves.

If we had a functioning regulatory environment... Haha. Nevermind. We vote for our leaders based on how loudly they promise to hurt trans kids.

To be fair the current leaders like to hurt ALL kids!

Mostly? PE's original sin is being carpetbagger capitalism, exclusively focused on short-term profit. Without even the usual "Evil Corp" veneers of domain expertise, or emotional attachment to the underlying business and community.

and pumping up costs

Increasing costs solely for the sake of increasing profits that is.

An increasing monetary base ensures this. It's simple economics and baked into most monetary policy around the globe.

If you take issue with increasing prices, monetary inflation (printing money) is the root cause.

I think we're talking about cashing out a company by prioritizing short term returns over long term survival (including insulting your customers, degrading the brand, committing borderline fraud, etc) . that's pretty orthogonal to broad structural inflation.

Ask anyone in leadership and you'll find the goal is always "outpace" inflation with shareholder value.

It's very simple and so many fight tooth and nail to see what's right in front of them.

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