THE ASSET CLASS

On the most voracious sharks in the waters of predatory capitalism.

It all started during the Reagan years, when, writes Guardian editorialist O’Brien, there arose “a special type of financial firm,” one that invested not in factories or technological innovations but instead in the things of everyday life. One such thing is water. Private equity firms have busily snapped up treatment plants, pipelines and delivery systems, and the like, taking advantage of the fact that, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, “Western governments were looking for ways to pay for their public services and infrastructure without taking on government debt.” Another target acquisition was care facilities for the elderly, a growing demographic that burdened those governments—and some enterprising firms, in O’Brien’s sardonic words, also bought crematoria “in anticipation of their clients’ final billable requirements.” Colleges that failed to deliver promised results; leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, and the gutting of once healthy concerns; dental practices that routinely “performed unnecessary root canals on children”—all are part of a looting of the public treasury without public oversight. And the game has gotten much more complex, she notes: One variation is the sovereign wealth fund, an instrument that has become “particularly appealing to despots because they could function as a secret state budget for paying off political cronies or enriching elites.” (President Trump has been “particularly keen on creating” such a fund, she adds, with the national parks as potential collateral.) All this financial legerdemain, O’Brien urges in this clear-eyed and indignant account, is fundamentally undemocratic, bringing ever greater wealth to the billionaire class while imposing “a regime of renewed austerity for everyone else.”

Carried interest loopholes, opaque reporting laws, limitless profit for insiders: O’Brien tells all, and it’s maddening.