Quick Flippers? Not These Firms

It is not unusual, especially these days, for private equity investors to be slammed as short-term opportunists. These funds, so the thinking goes, use their massive investment pools to buy companies, load them with debt, pay themselves hefty dividends and then bail out — quickly. What’s left gets foisted onto public shareholders.
Dismissing these firms as mere flippers fails to show the full picture, however. As The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin argues in his latest column, private equity investors often stay invested in their portfolio companies for years as they try to cook up a profit.