Our Lives in Their Portfolios
Why Asset Managers Own the World
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
All hail the new masters of Capitalism: How asset managers acquired the world
Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don’t just own financial assets.
The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which many of us live—all now swell asset managers’ bulging investment portfolios.
As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways. In this eye-opening follow-up to Rentier Capitalism, Brett Christophers peels back the veil on “asset manager society.”
Asset managers, he shows, are unlike traditional owners of housing and other essential infrastructure. Buying and selling these life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of their business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them.
In asset manager society, the natural and built environments that sustain us become one more vehicle for siphoning money from the many to the few.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this wonkish polemic, political economist Christophers (Rentier Capitalism) excoriates the ballooning power of asset managers. He warns of the dangers of the asset management financial model, in which firms manage money on behalf of institutions rather than individuals, and explores its insidious takeover of housing and infrastructure. Outlining how asset managers came to dominate these markets, he tells how Australian asset managers bought up public electricity, gas, and communications infrastructure during the country's 1990s privatization push. Around the same time, the Blackstone investment management company began purchasing multifamily rental properties on a large scale in the U.S. and expanded its acquisitions as housing prices plummeted during the Great Recession. The result, the author argues, has been an increasingly rich elite who draw massive profits by boosting utility and rent prices, leaving those who pay the bills worse off. Christophers highlights some shocking statistics ("Four in every ten of the world's equivalent dollars are now controlled by and invested through asset managers"), but his involved discussions of the complex financial maneuverings of asset management companies can feel dry and esoteric, even as he makes clear their devastating effects. The stiff presentation mitigates the effectiveness of the whistleblowing.
