Part of the case against private equity is documented. Much of the argument around it is not.

On 2 October 2026, a column in The New Republic argued that “everyone hates private equity”, just as Washington moves to open 401(k) retirement savings to private assets.

We wanted to know how much of that hostility rests on what the industry has actually done. Of 31 grievances we could test, 14 hold up.

Fourteen is fewer than the critics imply and more than the industry would like, so here is what we did.

We gathered the grievances made against private equity in the US debate, and the industry's own defences, and tested each against peer-reviewed research, official reports, enforcement records and regulators' filings, all checked on 4 October 2026. Each was classified on a scale fixed before we read the evidence.

The first thing we found was an absence. None of the established trust surveys we examined, from Gallup, Edelman or Pew, asks about private equity, and the only recurring polling that names it is sponsored by an advocacy coalition. On the public record, the hostility has never been measured directly.

The grievances are a different matter. Of the 31, 14 are evidenced, 9 contested, 2 unsupported and 6 untested. The evidenced core is concentrated. After private equity bought nursing homes, short-stay patient mortality rose by an estimated 11%. A bipartisan Senate Budget Committee investigation found that $424 million of $645 million in payouts went to the owner before a hospital system collapsed. Buyouts of listed companies cut employment by about 12% over two years and raised the probability of bankruptcy by about 18%. Institutional investors own about 3% of single-family rentals nationally, but 18% in Charlotte.

Framing runs both ways

“Private equity cuts jobs” holds for listed take-privates, but employment rises by about 15% after buyouts of private firms. On the industry's side, a count of 13.3 million employees at PE-backed companies is presented as jobs created, and a 4–5% annual return premium is claimed where an independent benchmark shows about 2.4 points over 25 years. Each side's strongest number is real for a subset and wrong for the whole.

What genuinely works

The same research documents productivity gains after buyouts, rapid growth in credit-constrained firms that private equity backs, fewer workplace-safety violations, and distress resolved faster and with fewer liquidations. They are credible because they are evidenced.

Nor is the licence one thing. It has been withdrawn for large-scale home buying: the Senate voted 85–5 and the House 358–32 to bar owners of 350 or more single-family homes from further purchases from 7 January 2027. In healthcare it is conditioned by measures in at least ten states. In retirement savings it is provisional: 37% of plan sponsors are very interested in learning more about private-market options, yet asset managers and consultants predict that only about 7% will have adopted them within five years.

Two things surprised us

Our view, for what it is worth

The theme may pass after the election. Its consequences will not. The documented core keeps renewing itself and is increasingly written into law. In the comparable industries we examined, banking, mining, pharmaceuticals and tobacco, communication without a change in conduct failed or backfired. What seems more likely to count is conduct that changes where harm is documented, that an outsider can verify, and that reaches whoever actually holds the decision: a state legislature, a court, a plan fiduciary. Four questions seem worth asking:

These are questions, not advice. The decision stays with those who hold it.

If the public record misses something you know, on either side of this argument, we would like to hear it. We would rather be corrected than be comfortable.