This is an extreme example of PE silliness (it’s extremely rare that a company has five different PE owners over a 20-year span), but it does show how dumb the banks were over the years as they just allowed the new owners to pile more and more debt on top of the company.
It also displays (something most folks already know about) how a large part of the PE industry – although not all of it – is merely a compensation scheme for executives. And where “value creation” is concerned, we learn again that “leveraged beta does not equal alpha.”
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