How asset managers came to own everything and you failed to notice

Listeners of the Rhodes Center Podcast have probably heard of companies like Black Rock, State Street and Vanguard. You’ve also probably heard how, through ETFs and other investment products, these types of investment firms own a staggering share of the world’s biggest companies (20-25% of the S&P 500 by some estimates).
But in this episode, you’ll hear about a whole other side of asset management; one that’s more opaque, and possibly much more influential (and corrosive) to our daily lives.
Brett Christophers is a geographer and professor at Uppsala University’s Institute for Housing and Urban Research, and author of the new book “Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World.” In it, he explains how asset management companies like Blackstone and Macquarie Asset Management do more than passively own shares. Over the last few decades, they've begun to invest in and actively run a growing portion of our infrastructure and essential services: hospitals, care homes, water treatment plants, bridges and even parking meters.
On this episode, he talks with Mark Blyth about the economics of this new subspecies of asset management, and how they’ve begun to reshape our society, economy and planet in ways we don’t fully understand.
Learn about and purchase “Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World” (www.versobooks.com/products/2...)
Learn more about other podcasts from the Watson Institute at Brown University (home.watson.brown.edu/news/po...)

[@subcitizen2012]

This reminds me of a local story I was following at the time outside of Austin TX in one of its suburbs Pflugerville back in 2016. The city and one of the states largest contractors made a deal for 30 years of tax breaks, in exchange the city would get a new gleaming "town center." $300 million at the outset on 120 acres as well as zonage and infrastructure for residential, commercial, and new city public building infrastructure. I'm having trouble digging up the time line at the moment, it's sparse to follow up on it. But the gist of what happened was the contractor turned around and sub contracted work to dozens of contractors, including a Chinese one (why are the Chinese building public infrastructure on the US...). And for close to a year they all basically just pushed dirt around. The property trust fell out with the contractor, the contractor sued them. And then I don't know what happened. I don't know if the contractor got paid twice for all the song and dance. I take it they didn't make the full $300m of course, but they got to pretend they were working for well within a year. Some amount of public money got squandered and the city never got at least that version of the city center district (I haven't kept up or been back in years to follow up). The site and project was also pelted with a handful of other lawsuits and controversy. The name of the game: public expense is private profit. If they perfect this, we effectively won't have governments before too much longer. It's already bad enough.

[@breft3416]

If? The horse is not only out of the barn, it is off the ranch entirely.

[@fixeroftheinternet]

Brilliant and enlightening. I used to work in old school asset management which was a racket on unnecessary fees charged for OTC trades. This is an even bigger grift

[@breft3416]

Privatization of any public service and trusting any contractor with money without oversight is the worst thing in world history to happen to the average person.

[@kikolatulipe]

The voiture message : « we are doing it for you , the teachers, firefighters and workers »

[@alcosmic]

Now that's a Blythely snide title

[@covett]

Research of a business model is a misnomer; it should be forensics of a crime scene. 😂

[@craigdonald551]

The rinsier economic model

[@socratesagain7822]

Interesting. Back in 1983, SF author, Alan Dean Foster wrote _The Man Who Used the Universe_ indirectly warning us which essential-to-social-and-personal _survival_ industries/utilities We the People should _never_ allow to fall into the hands of "privatizationists." Otherwise, we enter a Neo-feudal era in which we will pay rent for life just to survive and under which such hegemonic rentiers can inflate prices at will, the minute after the sovereignty prints money for commodity exchange. (By the way, Jefferson and Marx issued similar warnings)
Be well.

[@macrosense]

This is America. You can just emphasize who most of the blacks are voting for then talk a decisive portion of the working or lower middle class into voting for anything else. It isn’t as though they are going to pay attention to details.