Gretchen Morgenson on Unveiling Private Equity's Hidden Impact: Financial Journalism, Asset Stripping, and the Quest for Transparency

What happens when private equity infiltrates the world of business? Join us as we uncover the truth with Gretchen Morgenson, a veteran financial journalist who transitioned from stockbroker to investigative reporter. Gretchen shares her unique journey and provides a deep dive into the evolution of financial journalism. We discuss how the democratization of the stock market has changed the landscape and the critical challenges posed by a decline in investigative reporting.

In this thought-provoking episode, we tackle the predatory practices of private equity, using real-world examples such as Red Lobster and Noranda to illustrate the devastating impact on businesses and communities. Discover how asset stripping and leveraging companies with debt can lead to financial ruin, burdening businesses with insurmountable debts and forcing them into bankruptcy. We also delve into the complexities of the high-yield junk debt market and the intriguing shift of riskier debt to private credit, questioning how this movement might be affecting public markets.

Our conversation extends into the opaque world of private credit markets, where Gretchen shines a light on the urgent need for transparency and scrutiny. We explore her book, "These Are the Plunderers," co-authored with Josh Rosner, which uncovers the long-term consequences of private equity in sectors like healthcare. Shocking academic findings reveal the increased costs and mortality rates following private equity takeovers in healthcare settings. As we wrap up, we reflect on the current state of investigative journalism and discuss how to foster quality, narrative-driven reporting in an era where AI and entertainment-focused media dominate. Tune in for an enlightening discussion on the complexities and consequences of private equity.

The content in this program is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any information or other material as investment, financial, tax, or other advice. The views expressed by the participants are solely their own. A participant may have taken or recommended any investment position discussed, but may close such position or alter its recommendation at any time without notice. Nothing contained in this program constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments in any jurisdiction. Please consult your own investment or financial advisor for advice related to all investment decisions.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

My name is Michael Guyatt, publisher of the Lead Lagrime. Join me for the rough hour is Gretchen Morganson. Gretchen, you've got a hell of a CV, but introduce yourself to the audience. Who are you, what's your background, what have you done throughout your career and what are you doing currently?

Speaker 2: 0:21

Okay, well, michael, thanks for having me. It's great to meet you on the live stream. I am a longtime financial journalist Wow. Started that career in probably 1984, so ancient history. But was a stockbroker before that, so have a Wall Street experience that is a little bit unusual for financial journalists. Anyway, I spent 20 years as a columnist and reporter for the New York Times doing their Sunday Business column, and then went to the Wall Street Journal for a couple of years in their investigations unit. Now I'm the senior financial reporter at the NBC News investigations unit, and so that is just a brief outline of my background. So I'm an accountability journalist. I try to explain how the world of Wall Street works to everyday people who are not necessarily as tuned in and knowledgeable, and try to really help them understand how it impacts their lives and try to really help them understand how it impacts their lives.

Speaker 1: 1:30

Since you've been at this for as long as you have you mentioned 84, has financial journalism changed in a meaningful way? I mean I get the sense it's similar to traditional media in that it's become much more editorialized, more emotional, more about personalities. The accountability is maybe second to the entertainment.

Speaker 2: 1:45

The interesting thing about the arc of the experience that I've had, michael, is that it encompasses the period when we would call the democratization of the stock market, meaning that prior to sort of the early 80s, you know, most people were involved in the stock market through their pensions that were managed by professionals, and then we had the sort of democratization effort to bring people in Main Street.

Speaker 2: 2:11

Folks run their own 401ks, et cetera. So to me it was a time when you had to really help them understand what they were going to have to deal with as far as Wall Street was concerned. And so I've lived through ups and downs, bulls and bears. I lived through as a stockbroker the first real bear market in tech stocks in 1983. And so it was a really great experience. But over that period I would say that the focus certainly has increased on business reporting and financial reporting, but, as you know, we have seen a decline in investigative units, we've seen a decline in local media because of the Internet and the business model being upended, and so what I find is that there's probably a lot of mischief going on in places where you don't have reporters seeing it and reporting on it.

Speaker 1: 3:16

So that's actually a good transition to private equity. On the mischief side, I say that only because the thing about private equity is the word private, meaning it's meant to not be as visible. Now I had worked for a family office in 2010, 2010 into 2011. And, yeah, it was a $2 billion family office. They were very big on private equity and one of the arguments for among the family office colleagues of mine for why the patriarch of the family was so into private equity was because he doesn't get to see volatility. It's only price on certain schedules. Let's level a step for the audience. Explain what private equity is and what makes it unique, perhaps from an investigative perspective.

Speaker 2: 4:01

Well, as you point out, Michael, private equity the first name in the word is private, and that means that these are companies that are taken private by large funds. I'm talking in the book. These Are the Plunderers about the big, big, massive private equity firms Apollo, Blackstone, carlyle, kkr are. So these are firms that take over companies, take them private, intending to improve their profitability, and then want to sell them in, say, five to seven years time, and so it's during that period that these companies are private. That makes it very hard to see what's going on behind the curtain. So private equity uses a lot of debt. These kinds of firms are they're really the old leveraged buyout firms. So they changed the name to private equity, but it really is about using a lot of debt to which, as you know, helps magnify gains. Of course, it does magnify losses when those happen, but they use a lot of other people's money and debt to buy these companies, hope to improve them, make them more efficient and then sell them in a short period of time.

Speaker 2: 5:17

So there are a couple of problems with this business model that we're starting to see now. One is the reliance on debt. As you well know, we have had rising interest rates, and most of these companies raise debt money in the floating rate market, and what that means is their debt costs rise as interest rates rise. So that is problem number one for the business model at this moment. And the second problem really is the exit point. Ie that five to seven year term and that's a really short term prospect that these firms have to work within, and so to be able to say I'm going to flip this company at a profit within five years means they're going to really have to cut costs or cut corners or do something that's really going to allow them to do that. So those are two stresses that I think are showing up now on the private equity business model that really haven't been there before.

Speaker 2: 6:30

Now you mentioned your private office was very much into private equity in 2010, that period we have to understand that in the early years and 2010 would be in that timeframe private equity was outperforming the overall stock market, the debt market. It was outperforming other asset classes and so made it very attractive to pension funds that are underfunded and that need to bolster up their asset base in order to pay their obligations. Made it very attractive to family offices. But now, michael, the returns are reverting back to what I would say is the mean, ie the S&P 500. And so the outperformance, the alpha that these firms were providing has pretty much disappeared.

Speaker 1: 7:32

On that floating rate leverage point, is there a risk that that could be a systemic issue? I mean, I understand the exits are all different times and every institution has its own unique characteristics. So I'm not going to necessarily make comparison to the 08 lead up, but is there some undercurrent of hidden risk that you think could actually go beyond private equity?

Speaker 2: 7:56

Well, of course, part of the private in private equity also means that they're really not heavily scrutinized by regulators Not that regulators always do a great job and not that they're always on the scene before the crime or before the travesty we saw that certainly in 2008.

Speaker 2: 8:16

But they are really kind of out from the scrutiny that you would hope to have, and, in particular, a lot of these companies. These firms have gone into the insurance industry and they are managing people's pensions and managing annuities, managing the kinds of retirement accounts that people are going to need to be able to rely on in the future, and so, from that standpoint, I think there is a systemic possibility of a problem if these firms reach for yield, if they have losses that are the result of bankruptcies. We know that leveraged buyouts result in bankrupting companies far more often than non-leveraged buyouts result in. So I do think there is. I think these firms are so large now that they have become systemically important financial institutions, but they are not scrutinized and regulated as systemically important financial institutions, and I feel like that could be a problem if we see sustained high interest rates, if we see sustained bankruptcies and if we start to see some of the assets that they're holding for these beneficiaries have some problems.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Presumably that's sort of an incentive issue, right? I mean to the extent that private equity companies are more short-term because they know their exit is coming up. That results to your point, around the, around the cost cutting and all these other let's call them suboptimal for the stakeholders but great for the stockholders type of type of act. Do you find that that that is sort of a truism, that there's more of a a short-term dynamic when it comes to private equity, which is meant to be long-term, which creates these problems for others that are involved, not knowing they're involved?

Speaker 2: 10:27

I think so and I think that you know the $64 trillion. Question is why pension funds are investing so heavily in private equity as the you know returns decline or as the alpha declines. So you have an industry that you know thrives and or profits from slashing jobs, from selling off assets and keeping the assets for themselves. You have an industry that shows that bankruptcies occur far more often, and so why would pension funds be compelled to invest in an industry that is essentially working against the very people that are their beneficiaries, ie workers, right? And so you see, I think academic research shows that the average number of jobs lost when a leveraged buyout occurs is 13 percent. So you know, why would a CalPERS be so heavily involved in private equity if it's, if the very industry itself is sort of positioned against the workers for whom it's operating.

Speaker 2: 11:45

So you know, and the thing you brought up at the very beginning, michael, was very, I thought, astute as the volatility in this business, right. So your family office that you work for, they said we like private equity because it's not volatile. But actually that's really not true. I mean, if you had to mark these holdings like any mutual fund does, at the end of the day with stocks, or even bonds, for that matter, you would see extreme volatility. So it's something that is, I don't know, whistling past the graveyard is one way to describe it, but it isn't actually not volatile. It's very volatile. You just don't see it because they don't have to mark to market every day like a mutual fund manager does.

Speaker 1: 13:18

So I think people would say maybe in response to hearing this that okay, that's the role of private equity to get as much as they can from their investment. They do whatever it takes, even if that means that people in quotes get hurt from it, and that's capitalism, right? Is that valid as a counter?

Speaker 2: 13:41

It's a counter and it's valid.

Speaker 2: 13:42

And I'm here to say that I am pro-capitalism and I am pro the kind of capitalism that enhances the lives, the traditional American capitalism that allowed middle class and lower middle class people to elevate their holdings, their position, their actual stance in the American economy.

Speaker 2: 14:13

That is the kind of capitalism that I think America holds promise for. But I don't believe it is the kind of capitalism that private equity represents. I think private equity represents the kind of capitalism that enriches a tiny, microscopic slice of the population people who are already wealthy, of the population, people who are already wealthy and it harms a broad spectrum of other stakeholders. And I think if we're thinking about moving past the notion that capitalism should be only about serving the shareholders, that, the notion that the shareholder is the primo entity, person, representative that you as a capitalist want to serve, I think if we're trying to move past that to represent other stakeholders, the employees, the pensioners, the taxpayers, who basically are also hurt when companies go bankrupt, then if we want to move into a more broad, you know, idea of capitalism benefiting the many, then private equity is out of step.

Speaker 1: 15:38

I want to tug on that a little bit, because that point about enriching a small percentage is almost a constant now. I think it argues more than just private equity Right. The widening of the wealth gap is being enabled also through public equities, through public markets, especially because we don't have a culture of investing anymore. It's more of meme, stock trading, short-termism Instead of dividends. It's about capital appreciation and how fast a stock can go up and listen. You can argue that that's what you would expect in a capitalist system widening wealth gap. But of course there's a problem where the gap gets so wide that it creates real societal issues. Most revolutions are inherently about a wealth gap at some extreme level. How do you, if there were an argument to regulate that out, to try to figure out a way to have the stakeholders benefit more so that there isn't this risk of these small percentage of private equity companies enriching themselves? How would you do that other than through taxation? What actions could be taken?

Speaker 2: 16:43

Well, first of all, I think one way to address this inequality issue is to get rid of the loophole the tax loophole for carried interest which has created and minted more billionaires in the last 10 years than in the entire world history prior to let's explain that, because I think that's an important point.

Speaker 2: 17:01

Okay, so carried interest is it allows these very wealthy private equity entrepreneurs and managers to pay capital gains tax on the income that they receive, so it's a much lower tax rate. So you have billionaires paying the much lower tax rate that you might see from a school teacher or a bus driver or a person with a lower income, and so that really helps create the inequality, because it allows them to pay a much lower tax rate than they normally would do. So this has really been many, many politicians and administrations have tried to eliminate this loophole, and it's always beaten back by the lobbyists and by the advocates for private equity, and so that would be number one that you could do. It would really change the economic dynamic. Another thing you could do is you could require these companies, or you could bar them from being able to do some of the traditional tactics that wind up hurting the company but benefiting themselves. Now let's talk about one of them.

Speaker 2: 18:27

One is called asset stripping, and what happens is and it just happened with the Red Lobster chapter 11. Okay, so this is a real-time example of asset stripping by a private equity firm of a company, in which the firm got the benefit of selling assets the company had, but the company was punished or basically had higher costs associated with the asset stripping. Let me explain. So Red Lobster when it was purchased in 2014 by Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm out of San Francisco, red Lobster had really top-notch real estate locations. It really had primo locations great, you know on vast majority 500 of its stores for a billion and a half a billion five. Okay, now, the entire buyout of Red Lobster was for $2.1 billion. So, immediately, golden Gate Capital gets a billion five for selling the real estate under the Red Lobster locations. Okay, now, that helped it finance the takeover.

Speaker 2: 20:11

But guess what? Red Lobster suddenly had to start paying rents on those locations and, according to the bankruptcy filing last year, red Lobster was paying $200 million in rents. Okay, this was money that it had not had to pay before because it owned the locations. So, all of a sudden, the private equity firm gets the sale, the transaction and the proceeds from the sale. But Red Lobster has higher costs associated with operating. So $200 million is a lot of money. We are not talking about an all-you-can-eat shrimp thing that everybody was saying was the cause of the bankruptcy. This was an issue from the very beginning that Red Lobster struggled to pay these rents but the private equity firm got the proceeds of the deal. So $200 million in rents. The company had $2 billion in revenues. That's 10% money it would not have had to pay before. So that is an example of the kind of asset stripping that could be prohibited if you had discussions and agreement among regulators about that being a potentially predatory or problematic practice being a potentially predatory or problematic practice.

Speaker 1: 22:18

I want to expand on all your investigative work on the book, but what are some of the other sort of more egregious examples that you came across that were just as you looked into it and studied it? It was mind-blowing to you that something like that would happen mind-blowing to you that something like that would happen.

Speaker 2: 22:37

Well, one case that really was, I felt, egregious was involved an aluminum smelter in a poor area of Missouri, the Bootheel region of Missouri, and this was a company called Naranda and it was a very valuable aluminum smelter. It was right on the banks of the Mississippi River. I think there were 2,700 jobs that that Miranda represented in that small town, obviously a huge part of the tax base. And so Apollo bought Miranda and then they started extracting money from it. It was pretty much debt free when they took it over. Apollo started loading debt onto the company, increasing its costs, similarly to the way the Red Lobster real estate sale increased its costs. All of a sudden, aranda has to pay more to operate because of its debt. Apollo, within a very short period of time less than a year was able to take all of its investment out through these issuances of debt. So suddenly Apollo is free and clear. Everything else is gravy to the degree that it can make more money. And so you have a very interesting situation where, all of a sudden, now it's the house money they're playing with, okay.

Speaker 2: 24:22

Well, the aluminum market hits a stumble and the company starts obviously struggling under this debt load, the company starts obviously struggling under this debt load, the company starts to have problems. Now, one of the reasons that it had been an attractive buyout for Apollo was that Miranda had a very low electricity rate. It was really almost an asset that the company had, really almost an asset that the company had, and it had negotiated this with the state regulator, utility regulator. Well, when it starts having difficulties, apollo starts agitating to lower this very attractive electricity rate even further. No mention of the fact that the debt level that they have heaved onto this company is really the reason for its problems. So they start trying to agitate to get this lower electricity rate. Initially the state regulators balk. There are big hearings about it, but ultimately, as the company was threatening to leave town to set up shop somewhere else, they decided they relented. The State Utility Commission relented and gave them a better rate. Now what that meant was all the other rate payers in the state of Missouri needed to pick up the slack for Apollo.

Speaker 2: 25:54

Okay, for the billionaire-run Apollo. Now that didn't help. It helped a little bit, but it didn't stave off bankruptcy. So the company was bankrupted. 2,700 people lost their jobs and school teachers in the town had to pay their own health insurance because the tax base that Noranda had funded up until that point disappeared in the bankruptcy. Oh, and three pension funds were bankrupted also, so the taxpayer had to pay to shore up those three pension funds. So you see, this is what I'm talking about, about the circle of pain that's associated with some of these really aggressive deals. Apollo made three times their money on Miranda, and all the other stakeholders were basically savaged, and so is that the kind of capitalism that we want in this country? That's my question.

Speaker 1: 27:08

I want to pivot towards from private equity to private credit for a little bit. Here I've heard some really interesting narratives. I don't know how valid it is. So one of my major themes for the last year and a half has been while a lot of people correctly said they saw stocks and bonds would sell off together, I'd argue nobody in their right mind could have said that would happen with credit spreads being as tight as they would end up being like we're seeing today. And one of the arguments which is interesting but I don't know how much validity there is to it is that the high-yield junk debt side of the public markets is much in quotes healthier because the real junky stuff has gone towards private credit. So it's almost been this kind of anti-selection process and that's why credit spreads in the public markets look so abnormally low. Any thoughts on private credit separate from the private equity side as far as if that presents some other distortion or if there's some other dynamic there which is worth spotlighting.

Speaker 2: 28:12

Well, I think you're right. Or if there's some other dynamic there which is worth spotlighting, well, I think you're right. You know, watching credit spreads, of course, is a way to you know watch out for problems in all the markets. I think that private credit is one of these markets where you know there is less scrutiny because it is private. It is very, very entwined with private equity, the private credit market, and you know, anytime you see this kind of rush and flood to a relatively new market, you do really have to wonder and worry about it. I mean, I would just say that you don't have the kinds of disclosures in the private credit market that you have in the high yield debt markets that you really need to be able to evaluate whether the credit spreads are actually reflecting reality.

Speaker 2: 29:07

It's hard to imagine that private credit is somehow that much better than you know what you're seeing in the other parts of the market as interest rates stay high. I just I'm not a believer in you know entire asset classes somehow being you know able to, you know, survive or be different, or it just doesn't make sense to me. But I haven't done the analysis and I'm sure you've done way more than I have. I just would be deeply suspicious of any idea that it's different this time. We've heard that before.

Speaker 1: 29:46

Yeah, if it's too good to be true, it most likely is, and that's where you often see fraud. Okay, I want to touch on the book because you know. Congratulations on all the success. I don't know if you had written a book before. My father had written two books in the late 80s and I remember back then as a kid watching him on the. It was like one of the first iterations of a word processor. It was just a word processor, not a computer in the way that we think, and I remember the typing was orange on the screen. This is like a long, long time ago. Had you written a book before? What was the process like to write? These Are the Plunderers.

Speaker 2: 30:25

So I co-wrote it with my colleague, josh Rosner, and we did together a book in 2011 called Reckless Endangerment, and that was a book about the origins of the mortgage crisis. There were books that talked about you know how the sort of immediate timeframe of the mortgage crisis occurred, but Reckless Endangerment really went back all the way to like the seventies to an 80s to really lay the groundwork for what happened. It was a New York Times bestseller and it was a great, I think, way for people to understand that the origins of the mortgage crash were set in place far, far far before 2006 or seven, when you had this really kind of blow off, steam top, crazy top, where people were flipping houses like they were. So that was another book that I read that I co-wrote. You know, as far as writing books, I have never had writer's block, and so that's a real gift.

Speaker 2: 31:31

And you know, the thing about private equity and why we wanted to write about it this time is at this time is that we have finally, after decades of leveraged buyouts, we have actual data now that can show the impact, the longerterm impact, of the private equity industry, and so you have, for instance, longitudinal academic research that shows that, when private equity takes over a healthcare operation, costs to patients go up. And you have also research that shows that when private equity takes over a nursing home, that deaths go up. Okay, and so we didn't have that kind of data, long-term, you know, 10-year academic studies. We have not had that until pretty recently, and so the industry could argue that they weren't making that kind of having a negative impact in that way, and no one could really argue with it. And so until we had these very, you know, reliable academic studies that are not biased they are not paid for by private equity, which some studies are and so you're able to see the before and after.

Speaker 2: 33:03

I think private equity's involvement in healthcare is an enormous problem because it just promotes and propels the idea of profits in an industry that really is designed to serve the greater good. I mean, I don't mind if Dunkin' Donuts wants to put less sugar on the donut in order to make more money, but I do mind if they're going to staff a hospital or a nursing home in a lesser way so that they can make money, because those impacts are life and death. And so to me it really became compelling to write about, because they weren't just taking over food companies like RJR and Abisco in the late 80s. They weren't just taking over widget companies or aluminum smelters, or you know, you name it. They were taking over healthcare companies that are supposed to put patients ahead of profits, that are supposed to put patients ahead of profits. And that really sets up a moment for an inherent conflict that I think we need to talk about and deal with.

Speaker 1: 34:28

So I'm similar to you in that I don't really have writer's block when I write and I put out quite a bit of content, but neither does AI. And where I'm going with this is it seems to me that we're never going to be at a place where technology can replace what true investigative journalists do, which is put together a mosaic and think through and provide a narrative around data, making sure that the data is long enough to be valid and is valid anyway in terms of the way it's pulled together. How do we get to a place where there's more people like you? Because it seems like we're going more towards the entertainment side and more towards put it into chat, gpt, and that's going to tell me if it's fraud or not.

Speaker 2: 35:14

Wow. Well, that is a huge question, michael, and I really really am grateful for you asking it. I don't have the answer. I mean, we are seeing the industry devastated, really, and although some media outlets have found ways to, you know, survive and even thrive, it is very expensive and costly to do investigative stories. You have to go down the rabbit hole, you have to spend a lot of time.

Speaker 2: 35:42

It's not something that you can just flip at a moment's notice and it also helps, honestly, to have the kind of experience that you know I have, which is both Wall Street experience and long term, you know, a long view of what used to be appropriate practices and how those have changed over the years.

Speaker 2: 36:05

So, you know, I don't know how to guarantee that we can make sure that we'll have investigative reporting going forward, but I can guarantee you that if we don't, we are going to be worse off and you're going to have situations where investors are going to be really hoodwinked and taken advantage of, and that is a huge negative and people will lose faith in the markets as sooner or later. I mean, if enough, people get, you know, um, their lungs ripped out, uh, you know, because there's no one sort of paying attention or being a watchdog, you're going to have people who are going to say I'm out, I'm not going to do this, I can't trust it, I can't trust these markets, and that's that would be a terrible outcome. Terrible outcome because the markets have an ability to lift people economically and make their lives better.

Speaker 1: 37:07

I would take maybe the other side of it, which is that if you don't have trust in markets, then everybody views it as a casino. Other side of it, which is that if you don't have trust in markets, then everybody views it as a casino, which explains why we're seeing so many of these insane movements in these meme stocks and an environment where it's not really about longer-term investing, it's about shorter-term get-rich-quick.

Speaker 2: 37:24

Right, exactly, exactly, and that's nobody's idea of an answer to anything. I mean, god love you if you're able to ride that. You know, ride that wave. But wow, I mean, chances are not not happening over the long term.

Speaker 1: 37:42

Following the book's release and success and, by the way, anybody that's listening it's available on Amazon. I'll put a link up on the description here. I'll put a link up on the description here. Does it bring any action or outcome from certain readers that might be influential that say you know, this is really interesting.

Speaker 2: 38:05

We need to somehow have this be part of the conversation more Well. It's not so much that the book caused this, michael. I think we're seeing more and more headlines about private equity and predatory practices. We're seeing more bankruptcies, for instance, that are related to private equity. Big company called Envision which runs many, many, many hospital emergency departments and was owned by KKR. They filed for bankruptcy. We have the steward hospital chain bankruptcy, which is causing a lot of problems in certain states where the hospitals were located. That was another situation where you had the company itself. They sold the land underneath the hospitals and again the hospitals had to pay the rents where they didn't previously have to pay rents, increasing their costs and just making it a burden that they could not meet. So that is. I think we're seeing more examples of this.

Speaker 2: 39:08

So it's not so much the book that is raising awareness. It's these incidents and these bankruptcies and these issues that are coming to the fore, particularly healthcare. People understand that that is a problem, and so the steward healthcare disaster, the bankruptcy filing, which was a Cerberus deal. That was a very big private equity firm. I think we're just seeing that these are happening. These are events that are in the public eye and people are becoming aware of the issues and the problems. And now you have investigations taking place. You have Congress bipartisan investigations into the ownership of healthcare entities by private equity. You have the FTC also weighing in on acquisitions by roll-ups by private equity companies of, say, anesthesia practices, and so you're getting more scrutiny. Now I'm certainly not taking credit for it, but I think it's just a matter of these events are going to continue because of the high interest rate environment and because of the intent interest in healthcare, which everyone understands is not an area that should be, you know, used for profit purposes.

Speaker 1: 40:40

So you're two for two on the book side. I'm curious have you given thought to the next follow up, something that's interesting to you, that you think you might want to put your energy towards?

Speaker 2: 40:51

I don't have a thought at the moment. I'm still, as we are talking, about the most recent effort and so hoping that that's going to be continued to be of interest to people. I'll know it when I see it how about that, Michael? And then I'll run it by you and you'll tell me if it's a good idea or not.

Speaker 1: 41:11

I would be more than happy to take a look, gretchen, for those who want to track more of your thoughts, more of your work, what would you point?

Speaker 2: 41:17

to my work appears on NBCnewscom. We do not have a paywall. I've been writing a lot about for-profit health care and how that's impacting people, but I also do dip in my toe every once in a while on Wall Street issues and particularly areas that I think may be of interest to people who want to protect themselves from predatory behavior.

Speaker 1: 41:47

Ebrae. Please show some support. Check out, these Are the Plungerers on Amazon. Appreciate those that watch this and hopefully I will see you on the next episode of Lead Lag Live. Thank you, Gretchen.

Speaker 2: 41:56

Thank you, michael, really great to have a talk with you today. Thanks.

Speaker 1: 42:00

Cheers everybody.