Oh, the story to be told

The story to be told will be of the carnage and destruction wrought by the private equity firms.

This business model is disgusting. It appears toward the mid and late stages of a credit cycle, feeds on the old and enfeebled, and then retreats to its lair until the next time. It is predicated entirely upon low cost debt and how quickly they can extract their equity from the deal. Cov-lite loans and the like were the most crazy (and telling) sign of the apocalypse.

By the time they are done, there is nothing left but the bones.

What really roils me is that even when they get it wrong (and they usually do by staying too long at the punchbowl...the greed of man), they still manage to extract their pound of flesh. They buy old, mature companies/brands with 10% down, lever them to the gills, pay themselves a huge dividend (get their original equity out and then some), and then feast on the carcass with any additional dividends being money for jam (and if they are really lucky they might find another dupe (the public through an IPO) to flip the business).