Here’s a question that haunts anyone who’s watched their energy bills spiral, seen their pension dwindle or found themselves priced out of the housing market: so, who’s actually in charge? 

Ann Pettifor's answer, delivered with characteristic clarity and force in her new book, The Global Casino, is that it certainly isn't your government. What runs the world, she argues, is a vast, largely invisible financial machine – essentially a global casino – that sets the price of almost everything you buy, own and owe, beyond the reach of democratic accountability.

The central premise is both simple and staggering. The global shadow banking system holds $217 trillion in financial assets, operating beyond any nation's taxman, with asset managers and private equity firms deploying the world's savings as they see fit, answerable to no electorate. The cost-of-living crisis, Pettifor insists, is not a quirk of supply chains or post-pandemic adjustment. It is the system working exactly as designed.

One of the book's most valuable contributions is its insistence on conceptual clarity about money itself. Modern money is credit, not a fixed commodity which means that government claims about there being "no magic money tree" are political choices dressed up as accounting facts. The implications run directly into the world of work: when wages stagnate while productive capacity expands, the system inflates asset prices, expands credit and creates financial fragility, with workers paying the heaviest price through unaffordable housing, exposed pension funds and starved public services.

Where the book occasionally falls short is on prescription -- the path from diagnosis to redesign remains somewhat abstract. But this feels deliberate: Pettifor positions the book as a jolt of clarity rather than a technical manual, and on those terms it more than delivers.

Essential, if unsettling, reading.