New book criticizes asset management's influence on important social functions

The asset managers do not only own financial assets. The roads we drive on, the pipes that supply us with drinking water, the farmland that gives us our food, energy systems for electricity and heating, hospitals, schools and even the homes where many of us live – are all included in asset managers' growing investment portfolios.

– As owners of more and more of society's basic building blocks, asset managers affect our lives in a deep and disturbing way. In the book, I try to expose what I call the "asset manager society," says Brett Christophers.

According to him, asset managers do not act in the same way as traditional owners of housing and other important infrastructure. For them, it is not about long-term investment and careful maintenance, but about making quick profits for themselves and the investors who support them.

– Buying and selling these life-sustaining assets at a dizzying pace is the core of their business model. In the capital management society, nature and the built environment become just another means of siphoning off money, says Brett Christophers.

The book has attracted attention internationally as well as in Sweden, as some of the most active asset managers who invest in infrastructure and real estate internationally are Swedish companies.

– Many large investments in public assets and services in Sweden recently, such as Nya Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, have been led by international asset management companies. Sweden is absolutely part of the global asset manager community, says Brett Christophers, who also points to the problem that many asset managers try to avoid paying taxes in Sweden through so-called "letterbox schemes":
– With complicated tax systems in countries like Luxembourg, as in the case of Nya Karolinska hospital, there is ultimately a risk that Sweden will not receive the tax required to finance Swedish welfare.