Private Equity: Your Ears Will Bleed

Throughout the history of the world, there have been many cases of what is known as collective hysteria - groups of people, usually young women, who all exhibit the same physical symptoms of non-existent conditions. Is it psychosomatic? Is it group think?See omnystudio.com/listen ...  Show more

The Philadelphia Experiment is a bad movie from the 1980s, and also the conspiracy theory that refuses to die, despite virtually zero evidence of its occurrence. Learn all about this strange non-event in today's show.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 

From football clubs to water companies, music catalogues to care homes, private equity has infiltrated almost every facet of modern life in its endless search to maximise profits. By Alex Blasdel. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod 

As you’ll hear at the start of this week’s podcast Warren Buffet isn’t a big fan of private equity firms. He says they lie, so they are not a good choice for investors, like pension funds, for example. But they are even worse for the companies being acquired by private equity fun ...  Show more

If you want to maximize the value of your home for decades, you might update the kitchen. But if your time frame is one week, then you might burn down the house. Brendan Ballou is a federal prosecutor and special counsel at the Department of Justice, where he led the antitrust d ...  Show more

Private equity earned a reputation as a ruthless and lucrative business. But over the past few years, large groups have been doing something that seems like the opposite of their cutthroat image: giving equity worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the ordinary workers at t ...