The Asset Class
How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 23, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A thrilling, eye opening investigation into private equity, a secretive wing of the finance industry that is so relentlessly destructive, it could potentially undermine our way of life.
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. The name itself, "private equity," is its own kind of camouflage, giving no suggestion of the debt involved in its deals, nor of the controversial techniques it uses to generate profits.
The new owners think they can hide in the shadows. But the owned are fighting back. In The Asset Class, 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 follow the money, the trail of destruction, and the industry’s murky ideological roots from 1970s trips to Moscow to the present day.
What she find is chilling: private equity isn't just reshaping the economy—it's selling out the foundations of Western society.
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.
