Asset Management Firms Are Gaining Power Over Housing, Hospitals, Water and More

Photo: A woman walks near the BlackRock headquarters on November 14, 2022, in New York City. Leonardo Munoz / VIEWpress

Brett Christophers explains how asset managers like BlackRock and Blackstone have come to “own the world.”

Who owns our world? In recent years, one set of financial actors keep coming up as an answer to that question: asset management firms.

Asset managers oversee tens of trillions of dollars-worth of investments in assets across the world. The most well-known asset management firms are the “Big Three” of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Global Advisors, whose business model largely rests on so-called “passive” index funds whose stock investments make these firms the top shareholders of thousands of corporations.

But it’s not just financial instruments like stocks and bonds that asset managers hold. They are increasingly the direct owners of the “real ” assets that shape our livelihoods. From housing to hospitals and water networks to wind farms, asset management firms with names like Blackstone, Brookfield and Macquarie are gobbling up the basic stuff we all depend on to exist. And with their goal of extracting big profits as ruthlessly and quickly as possible, this new “asset manager society” does not bode well for humanity.

This is the topic of Brett Christophers’s powerful new book, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, published by Verso press. Christophers pulls back the curtain on a notoriously opaque industry and demystifies asset managers, clearly and thoroughly surveying what they are, the forces that propel them to mercilessly extract profit, and what all of this means for our collective future.

Christophers is a professor in the department of social and economic geography at Uppsala University in Sweden. He is the author or coauthor of five previous books, including Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?

In this exclusive interview with Truthout, Christophers discusses what […]

Full article: truthout.org

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