Fed Sounds Alarm on Commercial Real Estate, Business Bankruptcy

[empedocles]

3. Debt amok

Matthew Goldstein
By Matthew Goldstein
Feb. 19, 2021, 8:49 a.m. ET
The initial public offering of Apria Healthcare last week was a $170 million boon to Blackstone Group, the private equity firm that is Apria’s majority owner.

But as lucrative as that payday was, it wasn’t as good as the one Blackstone extracted from the company just a few weeks earlier: about $200 million in dividends, paid with borrowed cash.

The practice has a divisive history — Hertz and Payless, the shoe retailer, are just two of the companies that recently faltered after their private equity owners heaped debt on them while pulling out cash. Now dividend payouts are booming again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/business/private-equity-dividend-loans.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage