Behind every billionaire there is a story!

Who Runs Britain? How the Super-Rich are Changing Our Lives

They hadn’t heard of hedge funds, monoline insurers or subprime mortgages, but Marx and Engels would have been unsurprised by the effects of the credit crunch and the market turbulence of recent weeks. In The Communist Manifesto’s paean to the achievements of capitalism, they observed that its salient feature was “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” where “all that is solid melts into air”.

The aggregated wealth of the 1,000 wealthiest people in the UK is £360bn, or about 50 times the size of the Uruguayan economy. Hedge fund managers can earn up to £120m a year in the UK, £500m in the US. Sir Philip Green, the biggest beast in British private equity, paid himself (or rather his wife) a tax-free dividend of £1.2bn in 2005.

read the rest of the review published by Guardian here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2250712,00.html