What you would expect from private equity sadly. Destroyers of value.
One reason they may not be able to hire is that they paid a ton to buy out all the competition and now have a bunch of investors wanting to see high rates of return. That requires cutting staff and raising prices. I'm all for a free society that allows private parties to make agreements, but PE is by definition all about breaking markets by creating a monopoly where they have large amounts of market power and where no competition can realistically occur. The end result is consumers getting screwed all over.
Every single non-public business is "Private Equity". How is every single small business in the entire world "a pox on society"?
Perhaps you mean "short term thinking" is a pox on society? Or in, like in this case, a duopoly is the issue? If there were 10 such companies a reputation for slow repair would drive people to other suppliers and things would rapidly get better.
On the one hand, I don't think it's right to restrict the rights of the business owner. If they have a company with $20M in revenue and PE offers $60M to buy them out...fair game right? On the other hand, it takes perfectly profitable companies providing value, extracts that wealth from happy consumers of the product to people already wealthy and then leaves the consumer with a crappy, expensive, and barely supported product. If this happens just a few times...it sucks, but no big deal. Once it starts happening all over America, then we start running into systemic problems like not being fleeced every time you want to go to a concert. It's not like a competing firm can just pop up either in a lot of cases as there are huge barriers to entry. There is no recourse other than not ever seeing your favorite artist again.
"In the field of finance, private equity (PE) is capital stock in a private company that does not offer stock to the general public. Private equity is offered instead to specialized investment funds and limited partnerships that take an active role in the management and structuring of the companies. In casual usage, "private equity" can refer to these investment firms rather than the companies that they invest in."
Wheelchairs are regulated (barriers to entry), pollution is the nonexistence of property rights, and your take-it-or-leave-it noncompete agreement is a consequence of high transaction costs (job search, legal negotiations).
To expand on this inconsistency, it comes from different people cheer-leading "the free market" with different and conflicting sets of assumptions about what the phrase means.
For example, one economist makes an assumption of "perfect information on prices and transactions", and declares that it's the most efficient thing ever.
But another one assumes actors are free to make secret deals and private transactions, and concludes that the free-market doesn't have a cartel problem, because individual members will secretly defect and undercut so that it falls apart.
Those two assumptions are in direct contradiction, yet somehow the overlap phrase "the free market" still gets touted as having both of the incompatible features.
We are also told that democracy is the best form of government, and we are also told that our democracy is genuine, and that it must be protected. For some reason, people are unable to wonder if these various stories are true...perhaps because that skill is not innate, and is not taught in school?
We have a lot of work to get from here to there though, and much of it is the undoing of mass psychological condition.
> from a genuine, sophisticated democratic system
Do you think something more powerful than capitalism is impossible?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_sector_cris...
"Doomed" I don't know but they seem quite stuck now between a lot of internal problems.