I HATE PRIVATE EQUITY. I HATE IT WITH SO MUCH PASSION. Not investing. Not markets. Not business in general. I hate this one specific move: a firm buys a company using borrowed money, loads that debt onto the company's own books instead of the firm's, pays itself management fees straight out of whatever profit is left, and walks away clean no matter what happens to the business. Sears was a dominant, functioning retailer when Eddie Lampert's hedge fund took it over. Over the next 13 years, it got loaded with billions in debt, its real estate and brands got sold off piece by piece to pay Lampert and his fund, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018 with over $11 billion in liabilities. More than 200,000 jobs disappeared over that stretch. Lampert personally walked away with an estimated $1.4 billion. He didn't lose. He was never going to lose. The debt was never his. Nobody's saying capitalism itself is the problem. I'm saying there's a version of it where you can gut a company for parts, call it "restructuring," collect the fees either way, and the law treats it as a legitimate business strategy every single time.