Publisher Description
The forces behind an economic crisis in the making A “problem of twelve” arises when a small number of institutions acquire the means to exert outsized influence over the politics and economy of a nation. The Big Three index funds of Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock control more than twenty percent of the votes of S&P 500 companies—a concentration of power that’s unprecedented in America. Then there’s the rise of private equity funds such as the Big Four of Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle and KKR, which has amassed $2.7 trillion of assets, and are eroding the legitimacy and accountability of American capitalism, not by controlling public companies, but by taking them over entirely, and removing them from the government’s regulation. What can be done to check this level of power? Harvard law professor John Coates argues that only politics can fight the problem of twelve. * This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF that contains charts and illustrations from the book.
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About John Coates
John Coates is a senior research fellow in neuroscience and finance at the University of Cambridge. After completing his PhD, he worked for Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank in New York, where he observed the powerful emotions driving traders. He returned to Cambridge in 2004 to research the effects of the endocrine system on financial risk taking. His work has been cited in several publications, including the New York Times, Wired, and the Economist, and he has appeared on Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, and the BBC. His writing has been published in the Financial Times and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among other publications.