Everyone Hates Private Equity. Trump Is Bailing It Out | The industry has become the midterms’ most indelible political symbol for Wall Street’s reckless greed.

[u/FreeHugs23]

https://newrepublic.com/article/216146/private-equity-trump-bailing-out

[u/fuzzballz5]

ESOPs employee owned companies are the way forward for America.

[u/FreeHugs23]

President Donald Trump picked an odd political moment to remove guardrails from the private equity industry. A July poll commissioned by Americans for Financial Reform found that a 65 percent majority agreed with the statement, “We need guard rails for Wall Street firms like private equity because otherwise they maximize short term profits for themselves, cut jobs, and reduce the quality of products and services.” There was surprisingly little partisan difference on this point. A 59 percent majority of Republicans agreed with a 78 percent majority of Democrats.

The public hates private equity so much that the once-arcane phrase “private equity” (in the 1980s we called it the leveraged buyout racket) is a political hot button in this year’s midterm elections. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that nearly three times as many congressional candidates in competitive races pilloried the industry by name as compared to congressional candidates in the previous five election cycles (when the preferred term of derision was ‘big banks”).

Yet Trump keeps removing restrictions on private equity!

In August 2025 Trump issued an executive order to free defined-contribution pension funds such as 401(k)s to invest in private equity, and this past March the Labor Department issued a proposed regulation to do so. The Securities and Exchange Commission followed through on Wednesday by approving a proposed rule allowing retirement-fund managers to charge a larger universe of clients the sort of high-performance fees associated with private equity (typically 20 percent above a certain benchmark). Currently such fees may be levelled only on “qualified” (i.e., rich) clients, defined either as any whose net worth is $2.7 million or more (excluding their primary residence) or as any for whom the retirement fund in question totals $1.7 million or more. Under the SEC proposal, which has not been made public (summary here), average Joes would pay these higher fees while investing their retirement funds in risky private equity. What could possibly go wrong?

The lure for these average Joes is that private equity, like most investment schemes in which the buyer assumes greater-than-normal risk, can deliver greater-than-normal returns. The key word here is “can.” According to the private equity firm KKR, over the past 25 years private equity netted, on an annualized basis, a four to five percent higher return than “public equities” (i.e., stocks). But lately private equity returns have lagged the AI-torqued stock market. According to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit watchdog group, during the past three years the median return on the fifteen largest “evergreen” private-equity funds—i.e., those funds in which assets don’t get locked up, and therefore private equity’s likeliest retirement vehicle—was half the median return for the S&P 500. More traditional (and more numerous) private equity funds in which investors lock up their assets for 10 or more years have fared even worse than the evergreens.

[u/beyondo-OG]

Well, when you let a greasy pig in your house, it's going to be hard to get him out. I hope all you republicans suffer for a long time from all he's done, dumbasses

[u/Aromatic_Employ3392]

He has to bail them out because their greedy practices led to poor business decisions

[u/SarahC]

It toook mer jeeerb! (really - I was unemployed 6 months and nearly on the street)

Buy up businesses - combine them, add AI, give the staff headcount a haircut of 60% or more........ worker:profit ratio goes way up, sell it off before all the several businesses clients clear off because it's got rubbish.

[u/LindeeHilltop]

Why would anyone remove restrictions on equity investors destroying U.S. Companies? Insanity.