Until the 1980s, when private equity firms arose, Wall Street bankers were just bankers, middlemen providing capital to companies but not actually presuming to run the companies, let alone remake or dismantle or loot them. Now there are more than two thousand private equity firms in America owning and running businesses worth around $2 trillion. But finance came to dominate the rest of the corporate economy most profoundly by changing the job of the top executives at America’s several thousand public companies. The number one responsibility became not producing better products or satisfying
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