Forget Inner City Riots: The Quiet Looting of America Is Happening All Around You
The growing stranglehold on the American Economy by Private Equity, Venture Capital and Elite Investors
The food pantry line just wrapped around the block. Hundreds of people, waiting to fill a few bags of basic food goods. A spectacle that is probably happening on many Saturday mornings across the United States. When I see things like this, I become sad and unsettled for I know that there is something wrong. I know that there is something wrong when there are so many that need assistance for the most basic of human necessities such as food, in what is, still, the richest country in the world.
So on this Saturday morning, I am inspired to ask : WHAT IS SUSTAINING AND DRIVING AN EVER INCREASING LEVEL OF WEALTH AND INCOME INEQUALITY THAT ALLOWS SITUATIONS SUCH AS THIS TO EXIST IN AMERICA IN THE YEAR 2023 ?
Let’s forget for a second what you might perceive as a sly clickbait title and, just for a moment, pause to think, as if it were a short personal act of contrition, about the human landscape and your life, about your families, your neighbors and the overall state of the relationships between us. Then ask yourself the serious question of how much we, as dwellers of a shrinking middle-class, are aware of the slow, progressive deterioration of what was once a comfortable standard of living. What do we see when we look back? What can we remember ? We saw life moments and conditions like the following. Work life balance was in check. Hectic lifestyles were not the norm. Greater blocks of family time were part of our days and included time for a nostalgic, idealized six PM dinner gathering for a home cooked meal around the family table. We saw times when our weekly routines were NOT subject and oppressed by the tyranny of dense schedules which dictated how time was spent for us as parents and for our children alike, who, like trains on rigid tracks, are now incessantly moved, shuttled around from event to event, each valueless, from venue to venue, with little time for true spontaneous freedom. We fondly remember childhoods play out in a more natural ways, where not every moment was organized according to some strict regimen. We played, unaccompanied in green parks, among glacial boulders, and tall multi-centenarian oak trees. And we remember times when we still made time for church, at least time for a scrawny hour on Sundays at our local places of worship and encounter with our God, a few minutes to pray.
Now ask yourself the question if today that more balanced world is still part of our lives? The reality is that it not. That world is no longer there for so, so many of us. That quieter world is gone, a sliver of time forever lapsed, memories pitched onto a pile of oblivion. It has become an unequal world of opposites, one privileged, one struggling on.
For select few, an ever more thinning segment of the population, life has become a more Elysian, worry free and ever more financially stable place, an socially isolated, empathy-deprived world, where selfish individualism and broadly accepted relativism, has replaced most of what used to be the core structure of true community, in which , once upon a time, people used to unconditionally care for each other. I am describing the segment of society that constitutes the top 1% of the American income distribution.
Without leaning into malice and ill wishing, statistically speaking, chances are that you, as a reader of this article, do not fall into that privileged and “fortunate” group. Instead, it is more likely that you fall into the less privileged camp and are experiencing and perceiving a steady constriction of your quality of life. No, I am not wishing you harm, or hardship. I am just being a realist. And at the same time, I am hoping that you, my friends, are armed with a strong, well informed awareness of this new reality. I am hoping that you are coping well, through educated decision making, and lifestyle choices, and that you are able to fight back against the unrelenting, outward bound tide that is slowly carrying too many of us out to deeper seas.
We live in a world where our political candidates, government officials and hordes of highly disingenuous leaders who behind the scenes represent the interests of the ever more powerful constituents of a corporate-industrial complex, have brainwashed too many of us into believing that our collective interests have been and will always be put first. The political and corporate class make us think that our interests will be put above all other interests when elections are conducted, when laws are legislated, when economic policies designed, enacted and eventually enforced. But their actions are just designed as “vote-gaining”, “seat-preserving” tactics, unfortunate tricks that we all continue to fall for.
All wishful thinking! Just think for a second, that of this idealized level of fiduciary care and representation were to be true, I would bet that societies, including our own America, from the lowest socio-economic tiers to the highest, would be thriving and the current generation would experience a standard of living that is higher than what our parents experienced.
Instead, things could be no further from the truth. Things have been deteriorating. If you have any doubts all you need to do is look at macro level outcomes in order to dispel the false sense of social well being, the illusion of broad stability, of American superiority, exceptionalism and greatness. Of the macro level outcomes that are proxies for a just and equitable world, it is worth considering the level of inequality in wealth. This is the most evident sign that our society is no longer thriving as it did in the postwar war period and instead is steadily favoring a smaller and richer, unmeritorious sliver of the population, where, according to Princeton and Pulitzer Prize winning Professor Matthew Desmond, our socio-economic-political system and accepted world view “does so much more to subsidize affluence than alleviate poverty”. [1][2]
Folks, most of us live in the real world. Most of us have convinced ourselves that we are part of the so-called middle class, an economic label that used to be synonymous with financial well-being, and overall class happiness. In our system of Democratic Capitalism, we told and convinced ourselves that this was and should be the place to be.
Yet, for years, now, when we turn and look inward, we see a less rosy picture. Longer hours at work, more people struggling to make ends meet. Gone are the days where a single bread winner, man or woman, could provide for the family. For most households, today two salaries are needed to make ends meet, and, sadly live paycheck to paycheck. Fortune magazine reports that 61% of Americans live this way. [3] This especially true when socio-economic variables such as zip code, ethnicity, and level of education are factored in. Inequality, the gaps in wealth between the top and the bottom tiers of society have grown wider and wider. And the gap continues to expand.
For the regular Joe, for the inhabitants of the American middle class, life is increasingly feeling like a constant dilemma, a tug of war between essential and existential choices: home ownership, useful education, access to affordable, quality healthcare and the right to nutrition based on healthy, non-processed food.
For the millennial generation, things appear to have moved backwards. They were the first to experience lower expectations of wealth compared to their parents. And for Gen-Z, the situation is even worse. This has led to new coping mechanisms and adaptive responses: the emergence of new attitudes towards what defines the institution of family and parenthood, what defines personal happiness, financial success and growth. Both Gen-X, and Gen-Z are also, and inevitably, bringing about a redefinition of community, an expansion of the meaning of citizenship, and perhaps a redrawing of what constitutes the boundaries of one’s country in favor of a more cosmopolitan world.
Take a look at what the Pew Research center has to say in terms of the shrinking of the American middle class. [4]. Most of us in the so-called middle class have been squeezed. That’s what this simple graphic shows with data collected since 1971.
Let’s dig deeper. At a macro level, quantitatively the top 1% in America now owns 1/3 of all American wealth , while the bottom half, owns only a meager two percent. Population wise, that 1% of lucky people represents about 1.3 Million households or 1.7 Million workers. Put this into perspective. Yes, less than 2 million out of the roughly 129 million family units or households in America ( source: census bureau income in the US 2021 report) owns one third of all the wealth. To make it into this privileged group, average annual wages would need to exceed, $800 K based 2020 figures and total income would need to be in excess of $1.5 M per year. This statistic is not uniformly distributed. The data for the top 1% is itself is highly skewed. At the top 0.1% for example, the average income goes up to $9.4 M and today, this segment owns about as much wealth as the bottom 80% of households. Bear in mind, that this is owned by roughly 135 thousand households out of total of 131 million (see table below). Do you see the orders of magnitude that are at play here ? Over the past 10 years the the top 1% has seen its average real income increase by close to 20% The bottom 90% on the other hand, saw its real income increase by a miserly 1.0%
More recently, things got worse. The Economic Policy Institute reports that [5]:
in 2021, annual wages rose fastest for the top 1% of earners (up 9.4%) and top 0.1% (up 18.5%), while those in the bottom 90% saw their real earnings fall 0.2% between 2020 and 2021.
Does this sound like fairness to you ? Does it paint a picture that things are getting better for all of us when quantitatively we speak in terms of orders magnitude, where differences are measured in terms of 10x , even multiples of 10? Of course not. Wealth is being redistributed but not in the sense or direction that conservative politicians want you to believe. Wealth is being funneled, siphoned off from the lower income strata of society and concentrating, accumulating, compounding at the top.
The table above helps tell the story even more. Just look at the order of magnitude difference in change between the top 1% and bottom 90%, a difference of 206.3% to 28.7% since 1979–2021. Yes, annual wages grew close ten more for the privileged 1% more than the rest of us.
But let’s break this down further with the help of some Congressional Budget Office (a non-partisan Federal agency) data [6] and, data from the US census bureau [7].
The combined upper middle class and the one percent (the top 10%) had a predicted average wage of $173 K and held over 73% of wealth in America for a total of $82.4 Trillion, most of which was locked up in assets that do not circulate in the real economy. It is also worth paying attention to the graphic as it, not surprisingly, shows an expansion while the lower band representing the bottom 50% (section in green) shows virtually no growth . They owned about $2.3 Trillion in wealth. One must consider that for household earning below $75K, wealth accumulation is very slow and close to negligible as they are living increasingly paycheck to paycheck. In addition, it is important to note that bottom 50% also represents half of total American households or about 65 million households out of 131 million. What, what an even, uniform country we are!
[A more interactive graphic can be accessed from the Congressional Budget Office]
Now, let’s ask the important question again. WHAT IS SUSTAINING AND DRIVING THIS EVER INCREASING LEVEL OF WEALTH AND INCOME INEQUALITY ?
This is where we go back to the title and theme of my article. A gradual, quiet looting of America is happening at the hands of Private Equity, Venture Capital and Elite Investors who are driving an unprecedented consolidation of the American Business landscape into the hands of fewer and fewer, larger and larger corporate entities, public and privately owned. By privately owned, we are not referring to mom and pop, family owned companies. No, we are talking about privately owned , well organized, well funded investment outfits whose sole purpose is pool investment funds, grow revenues, streamline operations, and then extract maximum transactional profits, often by consolidation and structuring, downsizing, employee layoffs, exploitative practices, and brutal divestiture moves.
Today’s investment players own, directly control or influence a larger and larger portion of total number of corporations, and, by consequence, a larger segment of the real economy. Over the past thirty years there has been a steady decline in the number of publicly traded companies in fair and orderly markets where small and large investors used to be able to make investments with higher degrees of choice. The World bank reports that in 1992 there were 6592 public companies in the US. That number became 4266 in 2019. [8][9] At the same time, portion of stocks owned by non-institutional investors, that is you and I as independent, individual investors, has declined drastically. Consider that fact that in 1990, according to the Federal Reserve’s financial accounts of the US, non-institutional investors owned close to 67% of all US publicly traded stocks while institutional crowd owned 33%. Fast forward to 2020 and those figures are literally reversed. Institutional investors now control the markets.
Now, I know what you are thinking. I know what you have been told. Today, in the era of IRAs, 401K plans and other retirement investment programs, we all still participate in the stock market directly or indirectly. Really ? Have you checked the total management fees the funds charge? Fees that are unconditionally levied, with an authority that feels more like an unscrupulous taxman. Have you considered the games that high stakes investors such as elite hedge funds, play via high frequency algorithmic trading, and the enormous volumes of trades that take place in dark pools, alternative trading venues? They utilize ultra sophisticated trading strategies and have constructed ever more esoteric, investment instruments. Tempted to think these are mostly transactions executed for the benefit of pension or mutual funds that we, the little guys, own. Think again . The top wealthiest 10% now own a record 89% of all US stocks. [10] Yes, it is true that over half of Americans, 150M own stocks directly or indirectly, the top 1% owns over half of all stocks, close to 17 Trillion in value according to Motley fool, while the bottom 50% of Americans held only 19 Billion, yes Billions, orders of magnitude smaller. They call the shots. This entire situations feels more like a story told by Hollywood that takes place on the floors of some luxurious Las Vegas casino where the mob greedily skims millions off the top, screwing unsuspecting patrons. This reality is even worse that it appears. These happy-go-lucky patrons, by being cheated at the gambling tables, are being screwed twice, screwed by design, since the gaming industry, with odds in its favor, is already configured for guaranteed profitability.
So as the number of public companies declined, more companies are now owned by elite, by secretive investor groups. These companies are now privately owned, privately controlled. This ensures that transparency is greatly reduced. Through consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, something that is happening across many industries, growth and profit are the main goals of this larger and larger footprint of American economy. How is this achieved ? Cost cutting and reduction of overhead is one approach. But this is naive. The real answer is influence, political influence that ensure economic policies protect these growth interests over long time horizons, and political administrations. More and more corporations are owned by highly sophisticated, specialty investors that target specific industries, which operate as a nefarious fabric of government insiders, lobbyists and powerful corporate executives. This ownership scenario extends across industries, and their associated supply chains. A true cancer that continues to metastasize unabated.
Consider the example of REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts), specialty investment companies that buy and invest in commercial and residential properties. Follow for a second the value and supply chain for this segment. Elite investor groups invest or create REITs. Once operational, they expand their reach by also investing in large real estate development companies, the very same industry that builds the properties. You would think that is good. Well, not so fast. These additional properties controlled REITS are built for rental purposes, and not to drive personal home ownership. Why does this matter? For the middle class, home ownership has always been key to generational wealth transfer, you know the wealth that can be inherited from your parents, from that quiet great aunt, in a cycle that in the past helped ensure that children had a better life that their parents. Well, that vehicle, is rapidly diluting, evaporating, becoming a thing of the past. What can the members of the future middle class expect ten or twenty years from now? Not clear. Currently the path of generational wealth transfer seems to be is broken. Fewer and fewer families are able to enter today’s home market and become first time homeowners. The recent upward fluctuation of interest rates has made this an even more lofty aspiration, and makes losers of many of us. Does anyone win here? Of course: bankers do. See when rates go up, banks maximize the spread between slow changing depositor interest and the extremely elastic loan interest which is quickly adjusted to reflect interest hikes. Check the recent news reported by Reuters about net interest income to see how the top American banks (JP Morgan, Citibank and Wells Fargo) beat third quarter expectations.
And then there are stories from Maui, disturbing stories about how predatory property investors have been targeting stunned residents. [11] Saintly behavior, isn’t it ?
Let’s continue unraveling this value and supply chain. The elite group behind REITs also invests in companies that make the materials that are used in construction such as steel and in cement. They hold interests in companies that extract the minerals that are used in the production of construction materials. These companies, not surprisingly also donate to the appropriate lobbyist organizations that ensure that political alignment takes place at all levels of government. This is an increasingly easy task given that today there are more than 11000 firms that are registered as lobbyists. The end result is a complete supply chain coverage, influence and control. This is evil. This is dooming. A circular, self feeding, self-enforcing monopoly, and stranglehold, owned and held by a few powerful entities that does not include you and me. Get the picture ?
PE MODUS OPERANDI AND STRATEGY
Time for a quick psychology 101 refresher, so forgive for this a short detour.
Private Equity, Venture Capital and the investor elite follow a simple formula, a very simple formula indeed. Attack and target the basic needs of any person. These basic needs can be extracted straight out of Maslow’s hierarchy. Why is that ? The old adage says that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. Yes, but what comes before that ? Survival, indeed survival. All people, above and before anything else, need to address their physiological and safety needs. These include shelter, food, and ultimately, personal and family health. These are the bare minimums for life.
With this common sense fact in mind, now let’s look at where investor dollars are landing. Trends are nicely reported in Ernst & Young’s 2023 Global Private Equity Survey and Pitchbook. [12][13]
Key areas for PE investment are: real-estate and housing, a sector we have already started talking about, healthcare providers which now includes, believe it or not, family medical and dental practices, healthcare payors (a segment in the healthcare industry is considered recession proof) and the energy sector.
Let’s go back to the housing sector. It is a topic near and dear to my heart for I know people that,after having been displaced, correction, irrecoverably been displaced from their homes, are now permanently stuck in what, by all accounts, amounts to a very precarious financial state.
To see the investor community in action, let’s take a look at the housing market for single family homes. In 2021 about 15% of all residential homes were purchased by institutional investors. In the state of Texas, an astounding 28% fell into the hands of corporate buyers. [14] One must ask. Are they in the business of creating affordable housing? Nope!
The impact on home prices, rental and maintenance is important. Repairs anyone? When real estate investment corporation establish contracts with local contractors, they are given significant volume discounts, squeezing the regular Joe even further. Try hiring a plumber. You see, their buying power, price control power, hidden collusion and monopoly act as a forces that fundamentally make housing and shelter unaffordable.
Back to Maslow. How about food? Can’t get more basic than that. Consider the proposed Krogers and Albertsons merger. Private equity has got its tentacles in supermarket segment too, and has embedded there for a while too [15]. Consider the fact how PE firm Cerberus Capital still remains Albertsons, a public company and the America’s second largest supermarket chain, largest share holder with a share of 26.37% ownership. [16] Makes you wonder.
Seven secretaries of state who have recently opposed the merger, in a letter to the FTC, have stated that merger and consolidation “would give the retailers control of nearly a quarter of the entire US food retail market — a significant consolidation of the already limited competition within the market” as seven secretaries of state of objected. [17] Yeah, a quarter of the market. Smells like expanded monopoly to me.
By the way, I am still very mad that NYC landmark, Murray’s Cheese is no longer independent entity but owned by the very same Krogers. Shocked to see that even smaller outfits such a Murray’s Cheese have been on the target investment list. [18] So much for private ownership, so much for the little guy.
And then, there is healthcare. Oh yes, that thing that we all need to survive in case we fall sick or just happen to age, right out of the “Attack by Marlowe” playbook.
In the last 10 years alone, $750 billion in U.S. health care has been invested by private equity. [19][20][21]. The Trillion dollar mark is not too far off. Why does this matter ? It matters because, the right to affordable, quality healthcare is simply incompatible with the goals of the PE industry. As industry acquires, and forces consolidation across all segments of the healthcare industry, from family physician and dental practices, to nursing homes and long-term care outfits, profits will inevitably come first. Quality, patient rights will just be nice to haves, swept by the wayside. Let me restate the impact of PE takeover in a different way. Take nursing homes. About 10% of them are now owned by the PE investors. There is here is quantitative evidence that now PE owned nursing homes have higher rates of mortality, and patient health crises. This in part driven by cost cutting measures that have reduced the level of staffing that nursing homes carry. Have you seen the movie “I care a lot” ? Dark comedy inspired by our own homegrown reality. [22][23][24][25]
Despicable! Let us remember article 25 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
AN OUNCE OF HOPE
Folks, enough ranting, anger on my part. Maybe there are some signs of hope, right here at home. Let’s consider the Inflation Reduction Act , the CHIPS act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Three pillars of the Biden Administration, while an imperfect, this body of legislation provides plenty of signs of progressive, non-status quo thinking, and a set strategic supply and demand side incentives and actions, that will help usher America into a new era of improved prosperity and global leadership. Repatriation of manufacturing, more streamlined supply chains, a balanced energy transition away from fossil fuels, and investments that place emphasis on protecting sectors key to national security interests, are initiatives designed to quickly relaunch our economy along a modern trajectory that will affect all Americans, regardless of party affiliation, regardless of the boundaries of our electoral maps. Geographic areas that were once impacted by globalization, now, once again, have a chance to be active participants in a newer, updated economic blueprint that accounts for advances in technology , and a changing geopolitical landscape.
Here are some numbers for you. According to data on Invest.gov, a website that provides tracking and accountability for government spending, the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy and climate provisions have already created more than 170,000 clean energy jobs and could create 1.5 million additional jobs over the next decade. OK, I know that many will dismiss this as sugar coating, greenwashing, perhaps even government propaganda by our current administration, so instead how about listening to the voice of the capitalists themselves and looking at the data?
The cleanpower.org reports that $271 Billion have been invested since the three acts were passed, and this investment will continue to grow. [27]
The question is where is this money coming from? The government alone ? Not at all. No, it is coming from the American private sector. The same money people, rich investors we have talked about above, who have been strangling us, also recognize that climate change, creates boundless, perhaps self-sustaining, long-term investment opportunity. It is an opportunity that is estimated to be globally in the order of $2.7 Trillion. Got your attention? The American economy may just have pushed the Nitrous Oxide boost button. [28][29]
We can try to stubbornly protect fossil fuel traditionalists such as the coal mining industry or we can put our thinking caps on look at the possibilities, with a progressive, open mind that decarbonization and a global move to fossil fuel free world can bring.
Thanks for sticking with me.
References
[1] Matthew Desmond: “Poverty By America”: https://www.amazon.com/Poverty-America-Matthew-Desmond/dp/0593239911
[2] Eval Press, The Atlantic: “The One Cause of Poverty That’s Never Considered”: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/03/poverty-by-america-book-matthew-desmond/673453/
[3] Chris Morris, Fortune Magazine: “Nearly two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, study finds “ : ‘ https://fortune.com/2023/08/31/americans-living-paycheck-to-paycheck-two-thirds-lendingclub/
[4] Rakesh Kochar, Stella Sechopolus, Pew Research Center: “How the American middle class has changed in the past five decades”: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/
[5] Elise Could and Jori Kandra , Economic Policy Institute: “Inequality in annual earnings worsens in 2021”: https://www.epi.org/publication/inequality-2021-ssa-data/
[6] Congressional Budget Office : “Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989 to 2019”: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57598
[7] US Census bureau: Income in the United States, 2021: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-276.pdf
[8] World Bank Data: “Listed Domestic Companies Total”: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CM.MKT.LDOM.NO
[9] Vartika Gupta, Tim Koller, and Peter Stumpner: ”Reports of corporates’ demise have been greatly exaggerated: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/reports-of-corporates-demise-have-been-greatly-exaggerated
[10] Juliana Kaplan and Madison Hoff, Business Insider: “The bottom half of American families hold just 2% of the country’s wealth — while the top 1% of families have a third” : https://www.businessinsider.com/bottom-half-americans-hold-2-percent-wealth-richest-have-third-2022-9
[11] United States Real estate investors : “Maui unites against predatory property investors” https://www.unitedstatesrealestateinvestor.com/maui-unites-against-predatory-property-investors/
[12] Kyle Burrel et al, Enrst & Young:”E &Y, 2023 Global Private Equity Survey”: https://assets.ey.com/content/dam/ey-sites/ey-com/en_us/topics/private-equity/ey-2023-global-private-equity-survey.pdf?download
[13] Pitchbook: “2023 US Private Equity Breakdown”: https://pitchbook.com/news/reports/q1-2023-us-pe-breakdown
[14] National Association of Realtors:”IMPACT OF INSTITUTIONAL BUYERS ON HOME SALES AND SINGLE-FAMILY RENTALS”: https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/2022-impact-of-institutional-buyers-on-home-sales-and-single-family-rentals-05-12-2022.pdf
[15] New York Times Dealbook newsletter : ‘The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Spotlights a Popular Private Equity Tactic ’: ‘https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/business/dealbook/kroger-albertsons-merger-private-equity-tactic.html
[16] Marketscanner website: “Albertsons Companies Inc”: ‘https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ALBERTSONS-COMPANIES-INC-27329659/company/
[17] Eszter Racz; “US state officials express opposition to Kroger-Albertsons merger“: ‘https://www.just-food.com/news/kroger-albertsons-merger-opposed-by-seven-us-state-officials
[18] Wikipedia Entry:”Murray’s Cheese”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray's_Cheese#External_links
[19] Heather Tirado Gilligan, California Health Care Foundation: “ Study: Higher Death Rates and Taxpayer Costs at Nursing Homes Owned by Private Equity”: ‘ https://www.chcf.org/blog/higher-death-rates-costs-nursing-homes-private-equity/
[20] National Bureau of Economic Research: “How Patients Fare When Private Equity Funds Acquire Nursing Homes”: https://www.nber.org/digest/202104/how-patients-fare-when-private-equity-funds-acquire-nursing-homes
[21] Yasmin Rifiei, The New Yorker, magazine: “When Private Equity Takes Over a Nursing Home”: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/when-private-equity-takes-over-a-nursing-home
[22] Bain and Co: ‘dd Healthcare Private Equity Outlook: 2023 and Beyond” : https://www.bain.com/insights/2023-and-beyond-global-healthcare-private-equity-and-ma-report-2023/
[23] Michael Kroin, Ezra Simmons: “Industry Voices — Private equity investment in healthcare is making a positive impact … especially for doctors” : ‘ https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/finance/industry-voices-private-equity-investment-healthcare-making-positive-impact-especially
[24] dd: “Private Equity in Healthcare — An Updated Review of Selected Niche Investment Areas”: “https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/private-equity-investments-in-physician-practices-draw-regulatory-scrutiny
[25] Wikipedia Entry: “I care a lot”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Care_a_Lot
[26] White House Website: “Investing in America” : https://www.whitehouse.gov/invest/?utm_source=www.invest.gov
[27] Climate Power website, “One year of our Clean Engery Boom”: https://climatepower.us/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2023/07/Clean-Energy-Boom-Anniversary-Report-1.pdf
[28] “Clean Energy Investing in America”: https://cleanpower.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/CleanEnergyInvestingReport_digital.pdf
[29] https://www.pv-tech.org/us2-7-trillion-annual-investment-required-for-global-net-zero-by-2050/
