Private equity investors also bought thousands of healthcare facilities in the US in recent years, including non-profit hospice care, rural hospitals and small-town dentists’ offices.
But this wave of buyouts is running smack into a wall of persistently high interest rates, rising buyout prices and pressure over moribund returns.
Private equity funds are sitting on a “record number of unsold companies, many of which they’ve been unable to sell … or at least unable to sell at the prices that they’re looking for”, said Jim Baker, the executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, an industry watchdog.
The current catastrophic bullshitting tool of choice for the Finance industry is Private Equity.
Also see https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/04/private-equity-boom-hospital-job-layoff
It’s unclear whether we have a total crisis on our hands, in part due to shady reporting standards at pension funds, but it is clear that we have a real problem in private credit regardless. The issue is downstream of the problem in private equity where holding periods are up, and by extension, the net asset value (NAV) of funds held over seven years (sometimes referred to as “zombie funds”) has doubled since 2021. They can’t sell the asset, so they build continuation vehicles to recapitalize and hide the struggle that’s going on. But the real risk of this slowdown weighs on retirees, current and future.
God I hope the PE glut nukes itself. That would be so fucking incredible for the long term, in so many different ways, in a ton of different domains.
As long as there's capitalism, there'll be capitalists. I get poo-pooed almost every time I say this, but you'll never convince me the words capitalism and capitalize - meaning "to take advantage of" - are unrelated. Yeah, the inevitable massive recession/depression that is coming will cause some regulation to happen, but those behind it will do their damnedest to keep it as minimal as possible so they can pull their shit again, followed by gradual perversion of any regs they can't prevent from the get-go.
EDIT:
TL;DR: They may dig their graves, but - like the undead - they'll be back to suck the life out of the living.