VALEANT: ‘SUPER-AGGRESSIVE HEDGE FUND’

“For years, [the drugmaker] Valeant has been less like a drug company than like a super-aggressive hedge fund that just happened to specialize in pharmaceuticals. It made money not by providing economic value to customers but by financial engineering and by gaming the system. It exemplified a corporate era in which financialization too often eclipsed production. And, in the process, it forgot an important truth about markets; namely, that there are few free lunches.”

James Surowiecki, “The Roll-Up Racket,” in the New Yorker, April 4, 2016, page 31.