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 they 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 it than that? For decades, private equity companies have been hollowing out industries and infiltrating almost every aspect of modern life. 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 these secretive firms are waging war against our very way of life. By sowing grassroots division on a geopolitical scale, is private equity wilfully colluding in the fall of the West, in the pay of hostile regimes?