WHEN WALL STREET MANAGES MAIN STREET: SHINING LIGHT ON THE SHADOW BANKING SYSTEM

Join the Jamaica Plain Forum and the JP New Economy Transition as we step in to the shadow banking system to uncover what happens when Wall Street manages Main Street.

Since 2000, nearly 11,500 companies—representing almost 8 million employees—have been purchased by investment managers that make investments in the private equity of operating companies through a variety of loosely affiliated investment strategies including leveraged buyout, venture capital, and growth capital, otherwise known asprivate equity (PE) firms.

In Private Equity at Work, a groundbreaking analysis of a hotly contested business model, Economist Eileen Appelbaumand Professor Rosemary Batt show that Private Equity firms’ financial strategies are designed to extract maximum value from the companies they buy and sell, often to the detriment of those companies and their employees and suppliers. These actions often lead to financial distress and a disproportionate focus on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and wage and benefit losses for workers, especially if they are unionized.

Private Equity at Work provides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers.