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Marc Rowan, a contender for what may be the most important economics job in the U.S. government, is the CEO of Apollo Global Management, a behemoth in private equity, an industry notorious for its cutthroat profit-at-any-cost standards .

The 62-year-old executive’s rise to Donald Trump’s Cabinet, if nominated and confirmed, could mark a major victory for one of the most powerful (and often despised) financial sectors.

As Treasury Secretary, Rowan would directly oversee the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is nominally responsible for overseeing the “non-bank” financial system, including the private equity sector in which he is currently a major player. The Treasury Department also houses the IRS and the Office of the Comptroller of the Coin, or OCC, which oversees banks.

In fact, as Treasury Secretary, Rowan could ensure that these regulatory bodies continue to treat private equity as they always have, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. That is, left largely alone.

“That regulation really doesn’t exist,” Bill Lazonick, president of the nonprofit Academic-Industry Research Network, told me. “You don’t even know what private equity owns; everything is protected by different types of transactions and corporate structures.”

It’s impossible to know what kind of Treasury Secretary Rowan would be if picked. It’s not uncommon for industry leaders to join the government agencies that oversee the companies they previously worked for, and their reputations are, shall we say, mixed.

Rowan is one of the richest financiers on Wall Street – Bloomberg estimates his personal fortune at $11 billion – and as the country’s treasurer he would be well positioned to fight any attempt by regulators to rein in Apollo and other big private equity players like KKR to keep, to thwart. Blackstone and the Carlyle Group.

Apollo declined to comment.

Private equity firms, along with hedge funds and venture capitalists, make up the shadowy world of “private capital” – a market worth more than $24 trillion, according to EY research. That’s about half the size of the U.S. stock market, which is public and controlled primarily by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The words “private equity” are almost poetic in their ability to cloud in such a way that most people are simply turned off when they hear them. That’s by design.

“It’s an industry that likes to operate quietly,” says Megan Greenwell, a journalist and author of a forthcoming book, “Bad Company,” about private equity. “People won’t necessarily know how private equity affects their lives until some kind of crisis breaks out.”

Simply put, private equity firms (also known by the decidedly less poetic label of “leveraged buyout” firms) invest in troubled companies that are not publicly traded, overhaul their businesses, and later sell them for a profit. That sounds reasonable enough. But there’s a reason why employees typically have a negative association with private equity.

To buy a company, a PE firm typically relies on debt financing, or borrowing money from a bank. That debt then appears on the acquired company’s balance sheet and is only paid off with money generated by the company.

For example, when a buyout firm acquired Red Lobster a decade ago, it sold the company’s real estate for a profit. Subsequently, Red Lobster was forced to pay rent on the buildings it previously owned, significantly driving up operating costs.

Target companies often resort to laying off employees and taking other aggressive cost-cutting measures to pay down the debt their private equity owners have saddled them with to avoid going under. (Although very often they eventually fail. Research shows that the bankruptcy rate of companies acquired by private equity is ten times that of comparable non-targeted companies.)

“Putting a PE director in charge of the Treasury Department would be a disaster for the American people,” Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, which advocates for strong market regulation, said in an email. “The PE industry is grossly under-regulated and its business model is based on extreme positions of power and wealth extraction, often enriching itself at the expense of communities, patients and employees.”

Apollo, which Rowan co-founded in 1990, has more than $700 billion in assets under management and aims to double that figure by 2029. According to Bloomberg, Apollo “has built its name as the dirtiest private equity and distressed debt investor on Wall Street. Street by buying up companies and loading them with debt that offered creditors little protection in the event of default.”

Historically, private equity transactions have largely been handled by large banks. But during the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, as traditional banks became increasingly regulated and risk-averse, specialist PE firms like Apollo stepped in to undertake deals that traditional financiers no longer wanted.

The sector has become a concentrated and powerful force in the global economy, with more than $8 trillion in assets under management last year.

Private equity firms now have controlling interests in a range of sectors, including supermarkets, housing, healthcare, fashion, restaurants and veterinary clinics.

It’s hard to overstate how complex and opaque private equity financing can be, which is part of the reason why regulators and some lawmakers view the industry as a threat to financial stability. (The Financial Times has created the clearest possible flowchart of PE’s complicated web of financing, and it’s still quite confusing, to be honest.)

Democrats led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have introduced a bill that would make PE firms liable for the conduct of their target companies and better protect workers whose jobs are eliminated.

But that legislation has struggled to gain bipartisan support. And other efforts to enforce greater transparency and accountability in private equity have faced similar opposition. Last summer, a federal appeals court rejected an attempt by the SEC to impose new rules on the industry.

As of Thursday afternoon, the president-elect had not announced his pick for the Treasury Department, although Rowan was widely expected to be among the top choices, along with hedge fund manager Scott Bessent and Kevin Warsh, a former investment banker and former Federal Reserve governor. .

“I think if you’re concerned about the growing influence of private equity, there’s nothing that’s going to slow it down,” Greenwell said. “Maybe the Democrats didn’t intend to slow it down either, but especially now it will only continue to grow in size, power and influence.”