[lumost]

It provides liquidity to business owners.

As a business owner, if you want cash today because you are done with a business. You could go to a bank and get a loan to pay dividends. This is a bad deal for the bank as you have no incentive to operate the business after you cash out the loan. A private equity firm comes in and operates the business on the model that they still keep some of the profits after the loan value.

The crappy side comes in as a customer, the PE firm can do this to an arbitrary number of firms in the area and raise prices on each/cut services. PE firms can trivially build out monopolies. Many of these monopolies will be invisible as they leave the existing branding etc. in place.

[graemep]

That in itself is reasonable. However governments choose to encourage it with tax systems that mean you pay less tax by increasing debt. This is the main thing that breaks capital structure irrelevance: https://moneyterms.co.uk/capital-structure-irrelevance/

> As a business owner, if you want cash today because you are done with a business. You could go to a bank and get a loan to pay dividends.

If you are a business owner you could borrow yourself using the business as security.

[lumost]

but then you would need to keep running it, what if you don't want to do that anymore? how do you incentivize someone to keep it going to pay off the debt you just borrowed outside of the llc.