“A powerful and necessary book … brilliant” - Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy
“Excellent … More than a tale of financial engineering, it describes how our economies lost their way and surrendered the fate of ordinary people” - Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government
“Combining muckraking with moral clarity, O’Brien tells an utterly original story … illuminating and infuriating” - Quinn Slobodian, author of Crack-Up Capitalism and Globalists
“Truly brilliant and deeply disturbing” - Katharina Pistor, Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law, Columbia University
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.
The Asset Class penetrates a hidden empire of billion-dollar deals and covert financial warfare. From Copenhagen to San Francisco, Barcelona to the Yorkshire Dales, it follows the money, the ideological roots and the trail of destruction. What it 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.