The place where you buy your coffee and donut, your child's pre-k learning center,

your loved ones nursing home, your dentist or dermatologist's office,

the ER and the ambulance that tick you there, and your pet care provider,

maybe owned or overseen by plunderers.

That's what my guest Gretchen Morganson writes in her new book.

The plunderers she's referring to are private equity firms, P-E-Fs,

which typically buy companies, then lay off employees and cut costs, services,

benefits in order to expand profits.

The ultimate goal is to sell off the newly acquired company in a few years,

scoring a big profit for the P-E-F.

But it's hard to know whether a company is owned by a private equity firm

because P-E-Fs are shrouded in secrecy.

Their business model, Morganson says,

widens the income gap by extracting wealth from the many to enrich the few.

She's the senior financial reporter for the NBC News Investigations Unit.

She previously was a New York Times columnist and a senior writer in the

Investigations Unit at the Wall Street Journal.

She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her reporting on Wall Street.

Morganson's new book is called These Are the Plunderers,

Her Private Equity Runs and Recks America.

Her co-author Joshua Rosner is a Financial Policy Analyst.

Gretchen Morganson, welcome back to Fresh Air.

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