The Asset Class: How private equity turned capitalism against itself. Hettie O’Brien (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2026)
How to fix our ruined world
This fabulous book should go with Enshittification – see my last blog post from 10 June – as a guide to how everything in our world went wrong and how to fix it all. O’Brien tells the story of how the massive proliferation of private equity firms has led to our broken society. We’ve all observed and endured the detrimental effects of privatising everything that was previously done by governments, local, state or federal, leading inevitably to a vanishingly small amount of money going to doing the job, to serving the public, with the rest of it going to further enrich the already obscenely wealthy corporations.
O’Brien’s immensely readable book tells the human stories behind this trend – wrong word, trend – it’s more like a tsunami – and outlines how private equity ownership normalised an extractive style of management that was harmful to the wider economy, its financial engineering contributing little to growth or productivity, and how most of its benefits were captured by a tiny elite who translated their inordinate wealth into political power.
A decent society
Oliver Bullough, author of this year’s acclaimed Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How money laundering won, writes about The Asset Class: ‘Read it if you want to know precisely who is to blame for, well, everything.’
The struggle to rebuild a decent society, writes another reviewer, ‘should start with this book.’
One example of private equity making a killing at the expense of the public is aged care homes. Financiers began to think of elderly people as recession proof investments. Bankrolled by local authorities, guaranteeing profits. There was the business side that provided the care and an invisible side where the money pouring into the business was filtered through an elaborate world of off-shore holding companies whose inscrutability meant that no one knew what portion of residents’ or tax payers’ money was going towards the actual caring. Of course the actual workers in the care homes were paid so little that many of them were leaving for a job in the supermarket, which paid higher wages.
The quality of care for the elderly residents fell dramatically and with staff shortages it would only get worse. Whistleblowers went unheeded. The author outlines what happened in the UK; exactly the same happened in Australia. The UK’s Care Quality Commission also lost staff and of the 153,000 complaints between 2016-2917 and 8,000 reports from whistleblowers, only 11 per cent received a follow up inspection.
In the six yrs leading up to 2914 in person care home inspections fell by two-thirds.
After a takeover, deaths among residents increased by an average of 11 per cent. I’m surprised it’s that low.
An eye-watering exposé
The author takes us through the same story with water privatisation and other public services and utilities taken over by private equity firms and concludes that private equity might have been designed to magnify the flaws in our social systems and push them to breaking point.’ (p. 231)
She addresses the situation in the US too, claiming that Trump’s presidency demonstrated how easily an attack on bureaucratic inefficiency could slide into an assault on the foundations of government. She observes that it has ‘made America weaker and more unequal, undermined its capacity to govern its citizens, eviscerated its civil service and turned it into a laughing stock on the world stage.’ (p. 239) One aim of Project 25, she writes is to rewire the state in service of a wealthy elite. – I thought that was the sole aim.
Hettie O’Brien has a succinct, lively, engaging style that carries the reader along in a rollocking, eye-watering journey that explains clearly how we got into the miserable state we are in today. Order this book or borrow it from your library and if the library doesn’t have it, ask them to order it immediately. Everyone should read this. It’s time for the tide to turn, to put it mildly, and this book as well as Enshittification give us the information and uplifting spirit to start doing something about the appalling state our world has fallen into. We’re sleepwalking into Dystopia and it’s high time we all did our bit to stop it.
Leave a Reply