Private Equity at Work

This is essentially a collection of anecdotes about the highs and the lows of private equity, with a focus on the lows, with a final section that has some surprisingly good policy recommendations. Most of the book can be summarized: "Here's a case where private equity might have done a bad job. We actually can't prove it did a bad job, and don't have evidence to indicate that this is indicative of private equity overall." It's also less than convincing when their description of the relationship between GPs and LPs is, to put it mildly, extremely naive and inaccurate. They also weirdly assume that large banks are essentially clueless, which strains credulity, and often argue against themselves (e.g. referring to problems with PE firms hiding results and using documents from a company's IPO to back up those claims). I could go on, and to be fair there are some good points here, particularly when it comes to PE firms that target mid-market acquisitions. In addition, despite these earlier missteps the majority of their policy recommendations at the end of this book are quite good, although I don't think they would alter the industry as much as the authors. Overall, if you're looking for case studies and new policies this book is worth a look