Excellent show! Well worth your time to see how things work with big $. (Disclosure / my take: The video was done with AI. The real guy uses a younger AI version of himself on YT. But this does not matter to the subject matter discussion.)
YT:
Why are iconic brands like Toys R Us, Red Lobster, and J.Crew disappearing? It's not just Amazon or the pandemic. A small group of multi-trillion-dollar private equity firms is systematically plundering the American economy. In this detailed analysis, an economist breaks down the predatory playbook of the LBO (Leveraged Buyout), the sale-leaseback, and the debt-funded dividend. This is how a small group of billionaires gets rich by loading healthy companies with crippling debt and stripping their assets.
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I look forward to finishing watching this video, even though I disagree with the conclusions. What the author has done is to take some well known facts and re-arranged them, leaving out crucial underlying economic truths, in order to "prove" his thesis.
In fact, what is going on is that smart people will do smart things to protect their interests.
The underlying economic truth is that an ECONOMY has to produce things in order to be healthy. It can not survive in the long term based on service and retail sector businesses alone. There has been an imbalance of service and retail sector businesses compared to basic production of goods (manufacturing).
In the USA, many producers were driven overseas by high taxes, crushing regulations, and a workforce that became increasingly unfit or unwilling to work. The playing field between USA and overseas locations was not fair. Plus, foreign markets were protected against higher quality US products by tariffs.
Globalization and unfair trade practices are the primary reasons for the downturn. These things are driven by poor government policies. Investment decisions are a result of these poor policies.
That said, there is a better argument against modern manufacturing methods where one laborer is required to do the same, repetitive task, day after day. On paper these methods look good and are efficient (economical), however they create an inhuman work environment that relatively affluent US workers just aren't willing to fill.
