Today, private equity controls some 8,000 companies in the United States, more than twice as many companies as are publicly traded on U.S. stock markets. Private equity firms manage more than $4 trillion in U.S. assets and now own companies that collectively employ nearly 9 million American workers.
Like many PE firms, Sun Capital Partners often buys up existing businesses, loots their assets, squeezes workers, decimates jobs through layoffs and bankruptcy, and threatens workers’ retirement benefits.
Kathleen Kraninger, the current director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told an audience of bankers at a November 2019 industry gathering that “you are really helping drive the agenda.” Unfortunately for the public and for consumer financial protection, the Kraninger agenda and the Wall Street lobby’s priorities are indeed all too similar, and that has proved true even during the COVID-19 pandemic and massive economic distress it has produced.
Voters across all political parties are broadly and intensely supportive of strong consumer financial protections and of tough regulation of the financial services industry. This sentiment extends not only to keeping existing measures in place but expanding on what Congress did a decade ago, and has proved durable throughout the period since the 2008 financial crisis, through the weak recovery that followed and into the searing recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The federal tax code includes many tax breaks and loopholes that provide tremendous cash benefits to real estate investors, developers, and corporate landlords. Closing these loopholes would generate billions of dollars in revenue.
Sixteen charts showing the lasting impact of the financial crisis on family finances and inequality.
