These Are the Plunderers

**Author:** Gretchen Morgenson **Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

How a small group of financiers transformed American capitalism into a wealth extraction machine, why the middle class has been systematically hollowed out, and what can be done to restore accountability to the system.

**Who This Book Is For:**

Anyone who has wondered why the economy feels rigged, why healthcare costs keep rising while care deteriorates, why pensions are disappearing, and how a handful of Wall Street firms accumulated staggering wealth while ordinary Americans fell behind.

Something has gone profoundly wrong with American capitalism. For generations, the implicit bargain was clear: work hard, play by the rules, and you would share in the nation's prosperity. Wages would rise. Pensions would be secure. Communities would thrive. The system wasn't perfect, but it delivered broadly shared gains that created the largest middle class in human history. That bargain has been broken. Today, millions of Americans sense they are being robbed, but they cannot quite identify the thief. They lose their jobs when profitable companies are suddenly loaded with debt. They watch their pensions shrink or disappear. They see their local hospital, once a community institution, transformed into a cost-cutting machine that treats patients like inventory. They pay more for healthcare and receive less. They work harder and fall further behind. They chalk their misery up to a "system" that is rigged against them. They are right. But the system has architects. Gretchen Morgenson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent decades covering Wall Street, identifies those architects in this book. She calls them the plunderers: a small cohort of financiers who have perfected the art of extracting wealth from the poor and middle class while operating largely within the letter of the law. These are not the robber barons of the nineteenth century, who built railroads and steel mills and oil refineries. The modern plunderers build nothing. They mine nothing. They manufacture nothing. Instead, they use complex financial engineering, borrowed money, and regulatory capture to transfer wealth from ordinary Americans into their own pockets. The scale of this transfer is staggering. While the middle class has stagnated, the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans have seen their fortunes skyrocket. The gap between the rich and everyone else has widened into a chasm. And the plunderers have been the primary beneficiaries. What makes this story particularly infuriating is that the plunderers did not act alone. They had help from Washington. Deregulation during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations laid the groundwork. Low interest rates from the Federal Reserve provided cheap fuel for their debt-fueled takeovers. Regulatory agencies looked the other way. And when the pandemic struck, trillions of dollars in bailout money flowed…