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Toy R Us is still a thing in Canada, you can just go there and get your kid legos like its 2002
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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I watch the YouTube channel "Company Man" that does a bunch of interesting business stories. 95% of the "Decline of (brand)" or "Rise and Fall of (brand)" videos are because of leveraged buyouts.
A group of idiots borrow billions of dollars, throw the unrecoverable debt onto the books, slowly killing the company, and then it's dead.
Who loans this money? How does that work? I understand the rest of it about being a bastard who collects millions in salary and bonuses while driving a company into the ground. I just don't understand where the money comes from, or why.
The best book I've read about private equity is called Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss by Daniel Souleles. It's an ethnography of private equity.
Private equity is the logical extreme of the idea of shareholder value. Companies are bought, stripped for parts, and mined for resources. The money comes from wealthy people and institutional investors like university endowments, pension funds, etc, and some years it is a very high-return investment. Other years, not so much, see the relationship by the University of California and Blackstone as an example in recent years.
TIL: stock buybacks were considered insider trading before Reagan made them legal
The entire investor community is filled with shitbags.
Is there anything that Reagan hasn't fucked?
Whatever he didn't got fucked by Clinton.
"Bill! Get you dick out of the jelly beans!"
He did not. Have. Sexual relations. With that. Policy.
Your mom.
Well he better get to work then
Did you know companies can take out loans to buy their own stock to raise the value.
Pretty much nothing in "the economy" works like it does in theory. It's always way more complex so the people with the most power and money can squeeze more exploitation out of it. I really like how this guy explains it
https://www.facebook.com/reel/976701137942045
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1LcJjd6Wosw
He's got a whole series on Private Equity
I think that's the natural outcome. that's the emergent behaviour of capitalism.
those with more money have more power and more influence to make the system better for those with money and power.
the rest, like almost all "economics" its just BS to hide that simple fact.
This is like me taking out a loan to buy a car and then expecting the car to make the payment.
And since all the debt is on the company and not the people/organization who bought the company, they don’t suffer any of the repercussions of defaulting on the loans. Why this isn’t illegal is beyond me.
Well, in theory it's the responsibility of the banks to not make bad loans. If private equity passes on their debt to the company they bought, and then that company goes bankrupt and the private equity walks away free, that's still the bank's problem and they're gonna lose a lot of money. Of course the problem is banks have a pretty bad track record about being disciplined with their loans.
This is like me taking out a loan to buy a car and then expecting the car to make the payment.
It's even worse than that. Imagine you bought a car from a dealership and were making monthly payments on it. I take a loan to buy your debt from the car dealership, sell your car to pay my loan off, and then expect you to continue making your monthly car payments to me. You file bankruptcy to get out from under the debt, but by then I've pocketed months or years of your car payments and come out with a tidy profit.
And then I do it to hundreds of other people, over and over again, as long as other rich people are willing to loan me money. Which of course they are, because running companies into bankruptcy is incredibly profitable.
Something something road to serfdom.
Well fuck … that’s even more depressing.
It was illegal, then Reagan changed that.
Because of course it was Reagan.
Elementary my dear billwashere, in one word: money.
People don't notice the leeches, so noone cries out. This enables said private equity leeches to ~~bribe politicians~~ make considerable donations to various political action committees. And believe it or not, politicians like money.
Well, you wouldn't want those politicians to be poor?
Oh deary me, no, poor politicians would be susceptible to bribes
What will really shift your thinking is finding out that they have done this to almost all the hospitals in the United States, which is part of the reason healthcare costs have skyrocketed.
Hospitals need more to pay their leases, health insurers need to pay more to feed the hospitals machine, premiums go way up/more services restricted/more cost share (copay etc)
If you think it’s shitty that consumers can’t own anything anymore, they stole your wellbeing services while you were bitching about how little is still on Netflix these days
This is enough reasoning to say that capitalism is the single greatest enemy of mankind. The search for endless profit will kill everyone.
The culture of consumption is the greatest threat to humanity.
Capitalism, and even communism, are just means to that end.
Careful now, they're about to classify criticism of capitalism terrorism.
They told US TARGET killed Geoffrery!!!
Target ended up getting the rights to the brand didn't they?
What happened to Babies 'R Us? The one near me where we registered for our oldest got turned into a trampoline park. We took him there for his 9th birthday a couple weeks ago.
Weird. I heard Tyrion did it, but he did claim he was innocent!
Yeah?
Isn't that the entire thing that private equity firms do? Buy up companies, sell all their assets to the private equity firm, then have them lease it all back for insane amount until it's bankrupt.
Makes a whole lot of short term profits, destroys the company and it's employees. No fucks given
Private equity firms are a cancer (amongst many cancers) on humanity
Looks like EA is next on the chopping block.
Glad I stopped caring about the game industry.
Now it's just fun to laugh and point the finger at all the morons/losers getting taken advantage of for being stupid.
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