A thrilling, eye‑opening investigation into private equity, a secretive wing of the finance industry that is so relentlessly destructive, it could have been created to undermine our way of life.

Private equity people are just better: more tenacious, more ingenious, and more disciplined than just about anyone else. Or so they say. How else did these firms end up owning everything around us, from the home you rent, to the company that makes you redundant, to the software on which your union tries to fight it? As one insider wrote, "These folks are built to win."

But what if there's more to their success than that? For decades, private equity companies have been hollowing out industries, decimating social services, and leaving communities in ruin. Their leveraged buyouts and asset-stripping have brought healthcare systems, housing, infrastructure, and critical supply chains to the edge of collapse. Is this just the creative destruction that capitalism is meant to thrive on? Or could it be more . . . deliberate?

Join Guardian reporter Hettie O'Brien on a mole hunt, from Copenhagen to Barcelona, San Francisco to the Yorkshire Dales, and into a very private empire whose vast scale it takes journalistic ingenuity even to glimpse. Tracing the murky intellectual currents behind the industry's rise and following the money through some of its most outrageous deals, The Asset Class probes an unsettling possibility: that enemies of the West have deployed these secretive firms as a weapon against our very way of life. By sowing grassroots division on a geopolitical scale, is private equity colluding in the fall of our economic system? It wouldn't take much: just a little nudge in just the right place . . . And if they aren't secretly working for the other side? Well then we're really in trouble.