03.11.2026
How Private Equity Erodes Our Societies
With Hettie O'Brien
In recent decades, private equity firms like Blackstone, KKR, and the Carlyle Group have quietly become some of the most powerful companies in the world. They own our hospitals, our nurseries, our schools, our farmland, our wind farms. Their reach stretches from formerly public utilities to the houses we rent and the food we eat. In doing so, they have reshaped capitalism in their own image – all by using debt as a weapon to produce vast returns for the companies that own and control them.
On Tuesday, November 3, we welcome acclaimed Guardian journalist Hettie O’Brien, author of The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself. In the book, she takes readers on a thrilling, eye-opening investigation into this secretive wing of the finance industry, revealing how it is reshaping our everyday lives and how power and wealth now operate. She follows the money across continents and examines how a hidden group of dealmakers created a weapon of economic mass destruction that might yet blow up our financial system.
Participants
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Hettie O’Brien
Hettie O’Brien is a lead writer and Opinion editor at the Guardian, and a regular contributor at the Guardian Long Read. She previously worked as a writer and editor at the New Statesman, and as a reporter covering the Federal Trade Commission in Washington D.C. Her work exposes how complex systems and financial arrangements are transforming our lives by telling stories about the people and places they shape.
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Hani Salih
Hani Salih is a researcher, writer, editor and curator sitting at the edge of a long list of disciplines and practices; Starting with architecture all the way over to systems and policy. Hani is interested in understanding wider contexts to social and cultural phenomena and is currently doing this through his teaching work in architecture and design education.