All hail the new masters of Capitalism: How asset managers acquired the world

Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don't just own financial assets.

The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which many of us live-all now swell asset managers' bulging investment portfolios.

As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways. In this eye-opening follow-up to Rentier Capitalism, Brett Christophers peels back the veil on ""asset manager society.""

Asset managers, he shows, are unlike traditional owners of housing and other essential infrastructure. Buying and selling these life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of their business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them.

In asset manager society, the natural and built environments that sustain us become one more vehicle for siphoning money from the many to the few.

"At its best when [Christophers'] passion comes through, stripping away the spin of an industry that likes to portray itself as benefiting teachers, nurses and firefighters but which disproportionately enriches itself." - Financial Times

"Christophers takes up the global money trail, highlighting how investors have been quietly buying up critical infrastructure in Europe and beyond." - Irish Times

"An incisive overview of the outsized returns made on physical assets by a small class of global elites, and the price the rest of society may ultimately pay." - Spear's

"Worth persevering for the good stuff. Christophers chronicles how Britain has become the focus for Macquarie and the like." - The Sunday Times

"An impressive feat...Christophers does what few other economists are able to convincingly undertake in less than three hundred pages. He has written a book on the creeping financialization of our daily lives that an informed, generalist audience can understand, and told it through engaging and relatable case studies." - Jacobin

"Incisively dissects - and criticises - the landscape of this novel stage of capitalism." - City A.M.

"[One] of the best analysts of contemporary global capitalism." - Times Literary Supplement

"Christophers' neat dissection of the industry ... reveals how, while purporting to work for our retirements, it disproportionately enriches itself." - Financial Times

"Necessary reading for anyone wanting to stay abreast of our dysfunctional economic times." - New Statesman