It’s exactly a month until my book publishes on 9 April! THE ASSET CLASS is a narrative investigation of private equity, a relentlessly destructive wing of finance that infiltrates almost every corner of modern life. Here are some of the very generous things that people have said about it so far…

"Wars of choice rarely confine themselves to their intended targets. They consume not only the combatants but the assumptions that animate them." The dry and the wet burn together - by @eskandarsadeghi.bsky.social www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

*New short blog* - finally (with help) got around to getting a total estimate of Grok's climate pollution 🫠 - Once all fossil gas online, = to between half and all of Tesla's ANNUAL GLOBAL avoided emissions - Currently, 5x the emissions of Tesla's total manufacturing ketanjoshi.co/2026/03/02/m...

One factor currently putting private credit’s value at risk is the future of software With the ascent of AI .. about 20 percent of loans in private credit funds are to tech companies. Oracle has borrowed at least $56 billion from banks for its expansion of data centers to be leased by OpenAI. 💯

Hamba kahle Susan George. Her 1988 Fate Worse than Debt connected so many dots for me. She offered clarity without jargon, rigour without deference, and a platform for scholarship in service of struggle at TNI. 91 years, very well lived. www.tni.org/en/article/s...

📣 New on the CLaSP Blog: Bargaining over job loss: trade union legitimacy in the UK steel industry, by Chris McLachlan www.claspblog.org/blogposts/le...

Concerned about ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers? This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person. www.socialcirclega.gov/home/showpub...

Thanks to @claudinegrisard.bsky.social for pointing me towards this great special issue of CPA on 'The financialization of daily life: the lived experience of financially responsible behaviour?' www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

OKAY BIG ONE FOR YA NEW report out today: I dig deep into how big tech has been muddling tech types and overstating evidence to claim "AI" will make global emissions drop like a stone.... Not only will it not, it seems to be verifiably doing the opposite!! ketanjoshi.co/2026/02/17/b... + 📼+🧵>

BREAKING⚡️The High Court has just ruled that the government's draconian ban of Palestine Action was unlawful. This is a massive blow to the Home Office’s authoritarian approach. They need to stop criminalising people protesting a genocide and start ending the UK's complicity

New in @finandsoc.bsky.social: ‘The non-death of Adam Neumann’, unpacking the return of WeWork’s disgraced founder. It’s about Silicon Valley’s ambivalence to failure & fraud, and how venture capital rewards already-powerful, ruthless and deceptive serial founders. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

On the hellish detention and deportation system built by EU countries. With quotes from the current and the former German chancellors expressing their commitment to the inhumane cruelty of this apparatus, described here in forensic detail.

Very interesting recent paper by Xia Li & Caroline Flammer, which suggests that when firms' exposure to climate risks increases, they tend to adapt & lobby against climate policies, rather than mitigate or transform. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

"Hydrologically absurd" 😲

Queensland's Premier, David Crisafulli, has a slogan on youth sentencing: "adult crime, adult time". What about when your own government violates binding legislation for emission reductions targets (for 75% below 2005 levels by 2035)?

And here's what life is like in these camps - "locked in the same large, cold and damp room for 4½ months with more than 70 men [and] allowed outside for air and exercise fewer than 12 times in nearly 5 months." www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

The scale of the incoming inflation in the American prison industrial complex is mind-blowing.

🚨 The political economy of finance summer school is back, 3rd year running! Better still: We're bringing it to London via @lse-ei.bsky.social. 𝐓𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐜: Finance & democracy 𝙳̲̲𝚊̲̲𝚝̲̲𝚎̲: 4-5 June 2026 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦: March 1. Link below. We've got brilliant instructors as usual. Please spread the word!

Along with return of "new conglomerates" (@nsrnicek.bsky.social) in Big Tech, shift from publicly-traded to privately-held companies pointed out by @lenorepalladino.bsky.social is major shift of 21c capitalism.

PhD scholarship opportunity, to work with @sherilynmacgregor.bsky.social and myself on the 'local politics of climate backlash' at @uompols.bsky.social and @justcentre.bsky.social. Please circulate to anyone who might be interested! www.findaphd.com/phds/project....

Excited this piece with excellent colleagues is now out! We examine implications of geopolitical turbulence in the world for the GEP research agenda @yixiansun.bsky.social @matpaterson.bsky.social direct.mit.edu/glep/article...

Methane pollution from US oil and gas infrastructure causes more climate change than the entire economies of all but seven nations on earth. (This is with methane's climate impacts conservatively evaluated over a 100-year time frame. Evaluated over shorter time frames, methane's impacts are worse.)

New in SER: Nils Peters shows soaring UK startup valuations in the 2010s were less about VC power & more about a struggle for ownership. Late‑stage funds pushed into early‑stage rounds, intensifying competition & a small elite captured outsized returns. doi.org/10.1093/ser/...

My colleague @chaitanyakumar.bsky.social has a new substack on all things climate. This piece on the maths and models behind global warming is both terrifying and insightful. Have a read at open.substack.com/pub/chaitany...

Industrial policy for the prison & concentration camp sector

ICYMI: for the @newstatesman1913.bsky.social i went back to the ground zero for contemporary politics, 1990, to track the career of the James Goldsmith and his turn against the reigning free market orthodoxies to a new form of populism and anti-globalism www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2026/0...

🎁 Just before the holidays, the EU Commission granted Big Tech its Christmas wish-list: an unprecedented attack on our digital rights. Together with @lobbycontrol.bsky.social we have mapped how the Digital Omnibus closely matches Big Tech lobby demands. 👉 corporateeurope.org/en/2026/01/a...

Now available for pre-order and we're open for book talks to students, workshops and conferences, organisations etc. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

And the ones build inland (reliant on cooling from rivers/lakes) are increasingly threatened by drought

Super fun to talk about the US-Venezuela-Guyana oil triangle with @kendrawrites.com for SciAm's Science Quickly pod: www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/epis...

"An actuarial review of key #climate change assumptions shows we may have seriously underestimated the rate of warming as well as the related economic impacts. Unless we rapidly change course, climate damages will start to impact growth & future prosperity" #ClimateEmergency

A third of a billion spent on ruining people’s lives doesn’t seem a wise use of education spending

1/ I recently wrote about Frances Perkins—FDR’s Labor Secretary and first woman cabinet member. She is best known as the architect of the New Deal but she had a lesser-known achievement: She dismantled her era’s version of ICE.🧵

The finance industry is relying on climate models that understate the speed of climate change and likely economic impact. New report warns that climate-driven inflation, financial shocks, and insurance withdrawals could happen sooner than anticipated. 🧪 greenfuturessolutions.com/news/parasol...

This thread responds to Prof. Christian Dunn’s Telegraph piece on #climate communication. I argue it misdiagnoses public disengagement, underplays escalating scientific risk, & reproduces a media narrative that has actively shaped, not merely reflected, public resistance to climate action 🧵

A brilliant essay by @sammyfeldblum.bsky.social on what the unravelling of Thames Water tells us about privatisation, market failure and the place and politics of water in the climate crisis

what a read, on the global political economy of online scams www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

New open-access paper out (with Valérie Boisvert) in @econsocjournal.bsky.social , as part of this great special issue! Read it here: shorturl.at/L2Ui8 Core question: If conventional accounting is a growth infrastructure, then what exactly are the different forms of green accounting? A short 🧵 1/7

The private equity investment strategy of USS should be subjected to scrutiny. How USS became main shareholder in debt-laden zombie firms like Thames Water and G.Network is a scandal. Trustees should read research by USS members instead of advice from asset managers www.ft.com/content/2ca2...

Happy to have written about plastic for @thepolycrisis.bsky.social. Thanks to @70sbachchan.bsky.social for sourcing the excellent graphics. And thanks to @rebecca-altman.bsky.social and @anjakrieger.bsky.social for being my go-to's on all-things plastic. www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/pla...

This is a great, important piece by @joelkhalili.bsky.social for @wired.com - on how many Bitcoin miners have pivoted to generative machine learning. Plenty of technical overlap but just the core equation of [more GPU-melting-overconsumption] = [more money] is perhaps the most relevant

1/ This year, OCI’s research team challenged powerful blockers and helped shift the story on fossil fuels, uncovering evidence and exposing injustice. Here’s what we did and why we need your support for 2026 🧵

“They can’t [fix it], because it bankrupts the industry as we know it.” Captivating read on the millions of toxic abandoned oil wells in the US, the failure of regulation & the activists trying to hold the industry & government to account for cleaning up. www.motherjones.com/environment/...

Von der Leyen & the EPP partners with the far-right bloc to pass the first 'omnibus' law & slash reporting requirements for EU businesses on their ecological impacts & respect for human rights/labour laws in their supply chains. www.politico.eu/article/eu-s...

How Google Maps determines restaurant survival. This brilliantly unearths the political economy of the algorithm here. "You start seeing an algorithmic market - one where visibility compounds, demand snowballs, and who gets to survive is increasingly decided by code."

Every welfare reform in living memory is dressed up in punitive language. And yet the challenges are as great now as ever. Perhaps a messaging focused on support, to generate greater trust, might be worth trying? giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"Our analysis shows that in the aftermath of extreme weather events, lower-income neighbourhoods are less likely to rebuild and do not return to their pre-disaster state, whereas higher-income areas rebuild and tend to improve...highlighting increasing disparities in their built environments."

Pleased to see this paper now published - in it, I examine the status of Keynes as a post-growth economist www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...