Private Equity

Private equity investors are a relatively new form of financier who play an outsized role in the management of capitalist economies and who, over the last fifty years, have accumulated a vast amount of wealth and power. This entry offers an overview of some recent scholarship on private equity and makes use of direct ethnographic data to characterize private equity investors. I will suggest that private equity investors distinguish themselves by being universal experts in the identification and extraction of hidden financial value, and thereby wealth in businesses, which they then buy, manage, and sell for profit. This entry explains the debt-based management strategies that private equity investors use with their portfolio companies and also suggests that this exclusive focus on abstract, financial value has catastrophic effects on society at large.