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Over the past few weeks, many in the US and the UK have likened the sense of impending collapse to the early days of Covid. Just as we watched, nervously waiting our turn, as China, the Philippines, and Italy fell to the virus and began lockdowns during February and March 2020, six years later we’re witnessing countries around the world implement “emergency energy conservation measures” in response to what the International Energy Agency has deemed the largest oil supply disruption in history.

In the coming days, the last tankers to have departed the Strait of Hormuz before the US-Israel war of aggression on Iran will reach their final destinations, perfectly in sync with the US’ deranged double-blockade of the Strait that will likely intensify the global supply shock.

It can feel, in other words, like events are in motion over which we have no control, sweeping us away in their currents with no end in sight.

This feeling of powerlessness, however, is not only due to the knowledge that something epoch-defining is occurring far away and will inevitably blow back on us here (if we’re lucky enough to not already be impacted).

Such events also reveal just how distant we are from power in our daily lives, be it over the cowardly political decisions to actively support an illegal war, a financial system that leverages the global economy to make massively risky bets on AI and data centres, or the public services in our local communities that could be hit the hardest.

In her new book, The Asset Class, journalist Hettie O’Brien enters the world of private equity to expose just how far finance and its government enablers have gone to erode democratic control over the most basic necessities of life all around the world. Through investigations into housing, care homes, hospitals, water infrastructure, and more, O’Brien expertly untangles the mechanics, ideology, and catastrophic human impact of private equity’s debt-driven financial warfare.

I spoke to O’Brien at the beginning of this month to discuss how private equity actually works, its ties to right-wing populism, and whether we’re actually seeing the industry’s last gasps as a private credit crisis looms overhead.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Asset Class is now available for purchase online and in bookstores in the UK. The US edition will be released in June.

— Evan Robins

Evan Robins: You begin the book with an example of the quiet presence of private equity in your own life – the ownership of the railway arches near your parents' house in southeast London – and then you expand to the far-reaching and devastating impact of private equity on care homes, housing, water infrastructure more, not only in the UK, but around the world. What was your personal point of entry into awareness of this “secretive world” as you describe it in the book, and why did you decide to expose this phenomenon by bringing all these disparate strands together?

Hettie O'Brien: It's a good question: why would somebody become so interested in what can seem like a kind of niche area of finance? I was thinking broadly about stuff that I think we're probably all thinking about in Britain ever since the financial crisis, which is that the economy feels stacked against people.

A lot of the time we hear explanations for this which have to do with things like the lack of growth, financialisation, inflation or the cost of living crisis. While these capture a lot of truth in terms of what is going on, they can seem quite abstract and a little bland as explanations. I also think there's a risk that those kinds of big explanations can leave us a little numb in terms of what to do next.

But it was through conversations with someone who worked at Blackstone that I knew, and through a sense after the 2008 financial crisis that while there was a lot of focus on banks, playing out in the background was this gigantic shift of power towards a much less regulated and much less visible part of the finance sector that we didn't really know much about. Whenever I was looking at things like housing, for example, the names of these companies would crop up quite repeatedly.

The more I learned about private equity, the more it seemed to me to be a kind of high octane version of finance which had particular techniques that it put to work in some really mundane places – the places that we want to be boring because we rely on them every day, places where we live and work and actually die.

It also seemed that a lot of what had been written – there was some really good stuff out there – but it was either quite academic in the sense of being aimed at people who already understood this subject and were invested in learning more about it – or it was narrowly American-focused. I wanted to join the dots between places at a more international level and reveal this to be a sort of, I suppose, international conspiracy in some ways, but also show how it's affecting the texture and reality of everyday life in profound ways. It's the story of what it's like when your apartment block is bought by a landlord whom you can't get in touch with and you have no idea who really owns it – and the story of what it's like to organise against a water company owned by a sovereign wealth fund and a private equity firm.

Let’s go into some of those particular techniques. Can you describe what’s distinctive to private equity and how it differs from other asset managers – in other words, what are people confusing when they mix up Blackstone and BlackRock?

Continue reading on our website.