Privatising Humanity: How Our Essential Human Needs Became Financial Assets

By Kate Bayliss

A powerful expos of how finance turns our basic human needs into assets.

We have entered a new era of turbo-charged financial extraction. Having amassed huge reserves, global finance capital is seeking out fresh areas for profitable investments. Nothing and no one is safe.

In Privatising humanity, Kate Bayliss shows how investment banks and hedge funds target our essential services, while simultaneously extending their reach into lower-income countries. When it comes to investments in these sectors, shareholder profits are funded by us, the end-users and tax-payers who simply wish to meet our basic human needs for water, warmth and shelter. We have no alternative but to pay into these structures that generate massive returns for the rich.

Unpacking the details of these processes in three sectors in the UK - water, energy and housing - Bayliss exposes the devastating consequences of this model, which is driving inequality to levels not seen in a century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 152618298X
• ISBN13: 9781526182982
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Length: 240 Pages