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How Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act Would Rein In the Private-Equity Vampire

Let’s build an economy where patients, renters, and even youth hockey teams are given priority over investor profits.

With AI leaders publicly weighing the odds that their technology triggers human extinction, less-apocalyptic industries rife with bad actors—the big banks, health insurers—seem almost tame in comparison.

But until the machine uprising, at least, ours is a world profoundly shaped by those more familiar corporate malfeasants. And though they’ve been displaced in the headlines by the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, they’re still making American life more expensive, inequitable, and dangerous. And increasingly, if you go up the chain far enough, you will find the ultimate culprit: private equity.

Across sectors ranging from veterinary medicine to mobile home parks, ownership by these investment firms has been linked to deteriorating working conditions, degraded customer experiences, and devastatingly poor service outcomes—all to line investors’ pockets.

Today, over 33,000 businesses employing more than 13 million US workers are PE-owned. Unlike a traditional entrepreneur, who launches or buys a business to generate wealth but is also personally invested in its long-term viability, private equity often acquires companies to get in, get out, and extract as much profit as possible along the way. If that means shedding staff, stunting wages, raising prices, offering a cheaper-to-produce (i.e., worse) product, and triggering a death spiral for the organization—so be it.

According to Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, “The only incentive is to make money for the private equity firm. Sometimes that can mean strengthening the portfolio company, because you want to take it public…. Sometimes that means........

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