Some good stuff here, but....

You sound like all billionaires are republicans. Wrong. It's about 50-50 in fact. No billionaire will support Bernie or Warren but they did support Obama / Clinton / Gore / etc.

Private equity normally gets it money directly from wealthy individuals, not pension funds or hedge funds. The contributors understand that there's risk involved. I agree with you that PE guys have an annoying habit of suggesting they and their MBAs are actually smarter than the CEOs and execs running the companies they're investing in. I think this is OK if it's a rescue fund to save a company from collapse. The current financial landscape is so confused that PE money is dressing up as venture capital and making a huge mess of some otherwise promising young companies. VCs normally don't invest unless they have confidence in the founders, then they leave them to spend and manage as they see fit. Not so for PE guys, who love to meddle, remove founders and other key people and replace them with stuffed shirts from their club. This never goes well.

The tech stocks bubble will be exploded by the stupid money that walked in the door after the smart money. The pattern is extremely predictable but it's difficult to know WHEN it will burst so you can get your money out just in time.

In general I think most of us form opinions without fully understanding the mechanisms. Which is a pity because we may be right in principle but with damaged credibility, nobody will listen to us.

Also true that if we approach the subject from a clear agenda of anti-capitalism and a toxic hatred of billionaires, everything we say is erased and we are written off as socialist loonies.

Clearly the answer os not to scrap financial markets and return to Byzantine times of barter and trade. We need to curb the risk types that banks can take with our money, while accepting that we have no authority to control what a wealthy person does with theirs.