Books

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...

'A shocking, enraging, sometimes hilarious exposé of a tax system that lives down to all our worst fears of further enriching the wealthy at the expense of the little guys.' - Piers Morgan 'Very funny (and furious)... This is not some crazed figure on the extreme left hoping to bring down the establishment. The book is written by an accountant who has spent his career coming up with the very tax avoidance schemes the super-wealthy use to evade the clutches of HMRC.' - The Telegraph 'Funny, clever and really quite brilliant. Taxtopia will make you furiously angry and possibly even...

Every day, an unseen army is working to advance the aims of corporations and the rich. From accountants to trade associations, and from scientists to think tanks, the members of the concierge class serve their masters diligently, devising ways to help them evade taxes, change legislation, and sway public opinion. And the result is more profit for the rich, a widening of inequality, and a weakening of democracy. The Concierge Class is the first book to explain the inner workings of concierge capitalism. It shows how the affluent co-opt skilled professionals into hiding their cash, pushing their agenda, and whispering...

The book the American Prospect calls “an essential resource for future reformers on how not to govern,” by America’s leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian “An essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons.” —Naomi Klein A sweeping exposé of the ways in which private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy, The Privatization of Everything has elicited a wide spectrum of praise: Kirkus Reviews hailed it as “a strong, economics-based argument for restoring the boundaries between public goods and private gains,” Literary Hub featured the book...

The most sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left. The epochal shift toward neoliberalism--a web of related policies that, broadly speaking, reduced the footprint of government in society and reassigned economic power to private market forces--that began in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1970s fundamentally changed the world. Today, the word "neoliberal" is often used to condemn a broad swath of policies, from prizing free market principles over people to advancing...

Who really creates wealth in our world? And how do we decide the value of what they do? At the heart of today's financial and economic crisis is a problem hiding in plain sight. In modern capitalism, value-extraction is rewarded more highly than value-creation: the productive process that drives a healthy economy and society. From companies driven solely to maximize shareholder value to astronomically high prices of medicines justified through big pharma's 'value pricing', we misidentify taking with making, and have lost sight of what value really means. Once a central plank of economic thought, this concept of value -...

'A galvanising takedown of neoliberalism's "free market" logic, one rooted in as much history as it is in current events' NAOMI KLEIN 'A must-read for anyone keen to put the demos back in democracy' YANIS VAROUFAKIS Everything you know about capitalism is wrong. Free markets aren’t really free. Record corporate pro­fits don’t trickle down to everyone else. And we aren’t empowered to make our own choices – they’re made for us every day. In Vulture Capitalism, acclaimed journalist Grace Blakeley takes on the world’s most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crisis are the intended result...