The Asset Class
How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself
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- 16,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
'FINANCIAL JOURNALISM AT ITS BEST . . . UTTERLY TERRIFYING' PETER OBORNE
'PART WAKE-UP CALL, PART FINANCIAL THRILLER' SHAMI CHAKRABARTI
A thrilling, eye-opening investigation into private equity, a secretive wing of the finance industry that is so relentlessly destructive, it could have been created to undermine our way of life
You don't know their names, but they own the house you rent. They own your hospitals, nurseries and care homes, the media you consume and the companies you work for. They even own the tools your union uses to fight back. Business is a contest - and they say their people are built to win. But when does competition become a struggle to the death?
For decades, private equity firms have infiltrated every corner of modern life. Wielding debt as a weapon, they push vital services into crisis. Their cover story: that this is merely the 'creative destruction' essential to growth. Old-school capitalists say they're dismantling everything that made our economies work.
In The Asset Class, reporter Hettie O'Brien penetrates a hidden empire of billion-dollar deals and covert financial warfare. From Copenhagen to San Francisco, Barcelona to the Yorkshire Dales, she follows the money, the ideological roots and the trail of destruction. What she finds is chilling: private equity isn't just reshaping the economy - it's selling out the foundations of Western society.
The new owners think they can hide in the shadows. But the owned are fighting back.
'DEFTLY LIFTS THE CURTAIN ON A MURKY WORLD OF GREED AND DESTRUCTION' DANNY DORLING
'DAZZLING' HA-JOON CHANG
'ESSENTIAL' GRACE BLAKELEY
'WILD' JOLYON MAUGHAM
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Brien, a financial journalist and assistant opinion editor at the Guardian, debuts with a smart examination of private equity. This secretive industry, she explains, claims to unlock the full earning potential of mismanaged companies for the benefit of investors but in reality weakens governments and widens the chasm between rich and poor. She traces private equity's origins to the 1970s, as an attempt to revive stagnant Western economies. Its early adopters included economic policy advisers to U.S. president Ronald Reagan and U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Case studies reveal how private equity hobbles essential sectors—including British nursing homes, Danish housing, and Kenyan hospitals—while laundering money for billionaires, pension funds, and autocrats thanks to regulatory loopholes. Elsewhere, O'Brien examines the resulting backlash as well as the futility of individual opposition—whether from outraged customers of privatized water companies in Northern England or short sellers on Wall Street who dared to take on Blackstone, the world's largest private-equity firm. Much has been written about private equity's harms to American consumers, workers, and taxpayers; O'Brien's investigation widens the scope to the entire Western economic system, exposing a global conspiracy in a narrative that has all the stakes and most of the accessibility of spy fiction. Readers will be entertained and enlightened.
