You may have never heard of Private Equity firms like Blackstone, KKR, Bain Capital or the Carlyle Group, but in recent decades they have quietly become some of the most powerful companies in the world. They own your hospitals, your nurseries, your schools. Their reach stretches from once public utilities to the houses you rent and the food you eat. In doing so, they have reshaped capitalism in their own image – all by using debt as a weapon to produce vast returns for the companies who own and control them.
Our guest this week is the Guardian journalist Hettie O’Brien, author of The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself.
ICYMI: last week we published a symposium on the American-Israeli war on Iran, with essays from Kate Mackenzie, Patrick Bigger and Kevin Cashman, Toby Craig Jones and Guy Laron.
