David is surely right on this - the good that they did was that they put up the cash when Ford needed it; we can all sit around saying that it's easy to load a company up with debt and flip it for a quick turn, but these were the people who were prepared to actually place the cash on the barrelhead. They even took a genuine and large risk, because if there had been a sudden market crash or something they would have looked like the most unbelievable idiots. -----Original Message-----
But far too often financiers seek to increase their wealth in plainly unproductive ways. For instance what good did the private equity firm that flipped Hertz recently do? (They loaded the company with debt paid themselves $1B and IPOed it.) -----------
