The Asset Class: How Private Equity Sold Out the West

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Description

Private equity people are just better: more tenacious, more ingenious, and more disciplined than just about anyone else. Or so they say. How else did they end up owning everything around us, from the home you rent, to the company that makes you redundant, to the software on which your union tries to fight it As one insider wrote, 'These folks are built to win.'

But what if there's more to it than that For decades, private equity companies have been hollowing out industries and infiltrating almost every aspect of modern life. Their leveraged buyouts and asset-stripping have brought healthcare systems, housing, infrastructure, and critical supply chains to the edge of collapse. Is this just the creative destruction that capitalism is meant to thrive on Or could it be more . . . deliberate

Join Guardian reporter Hettie O'Brien on a mole hunt from Copenhagen to Barcelona, San Francisco to the Yorkshire Dales, and into a very private empire whose vast scale it takes journalistic ingenuity even to glimpse. Tracing the murky intellectual currents behind the industry's rise, and following the money through some of its most outrageous deals, The Asset Class probes an unsettling possibility: that these secretive firms are waging war against our very way of life. By sowing grassroots division on a geopolitical scale, is private equity wilfully colluding in the fall of the West, in the pay of hostile regimes

Author Bio

Hettie O'Brien is a comment editor for the Guardian, where she also writes about social affairs and the incursion of finance into everyday life. She has covered economic and social affairs for the New Statesman, and corporate monopolies and the Federal Trade Commission while working as a reporter based in Washington D.C. Before becoming a journalist, she worked as a researcher for Rethinking Economics.