I’ve really enjoyed listening to Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the End of Freedom (2024) by Grace Blakeley. It’s been an exhausting and stressful time in the Couchtrip household this past week and I’ve appreciated having Blakeley’s compelling storytelling, moral clarity and economic analysis to listen to.

If books can change the world, and I think they do (at different levels), then I think this one can do that. I’m not sure how many people really read economics books these days but this one should be compulsory reading for all Economics students and anyone who is interested in making capitalism actually work for everyday people. Blakeley writes about big companies we all know or have heard about – Boeing, Blackrock, Amazon, McKinsey, Ford and countless others – and shows how states (and the United States in particular) have deliberately propped them up, supported them, bailed them out, colluded with them. Basically what she points out is that, all in the name of ‘freedom’, there is massive collusion between big companies, financial institutions and states, and the result is, you guessed it, that the rich get richer, the poor remain poor and the environment is being decimated.

The part that particularly shocked me was the involvement of the US (and the CIA in particular) in supporting authoritarian and murderous regimes in Latin America and the developing world in order to preserve and support big multinationals. What she also does brilliantly is to dismantle the myth that capitalism is all about freedom (and free markets) while socialism is all about government control. The left has a job to do to re-craft the stories we tell about state planning, development and business.

And now … Indulge me, if you will, by reading this playful discussion of Blakeley’s ideas through the lens of Harry Potter. I was struck with the image of Grace B as Hermione Granger – brilliant, passionate with righteous anger – and so I asked Chat to develop this analogy. The result, to me at any rate, is gobsmacking. I know that AI, apart from being a massive bubble that is heading for a burst at some point, is doing a lot of harm but it can also be used for good. In this case it helps to craft a compelling story around capitalism and those who seek to build a better world. Read and please let me know any thoughts you have.

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In the wizarding world of contemporary capitalism, few figures wield their wand with the righteous precision of Grace Blakeley. Like Hermione Granger stalking the Hogwarts library after curfew, Blakeley reads the ancient spellbooks of economics not for abstract amusement but to expose the dark enchantments that bind our world. Vulture Capitalism, her latest manifesto, is less an academic text than a counter-spell—an attempt to reveal the invisible magic by which corporations drain public wealth while insisting that the plunder is “efficiency.”

If Blakeley is Hermione — nerdy brilliance wedded to moral ferocity — then who populates her economic Hogwarts? Every mythology needs its heroes, villains, and wise mentors, and the story of modern political economy fits surprisingly well inside Rowling’s enchanted scaffolding.

⚡ The Hero Who Lived

Enter Thomas Piketty, or perhaps Mariana Mazzucato, the Harry Potter of economic reform. Both burst from the dusty pages of academia into the mainstream like underdogs discovering their patronus. Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century exposed the Voldemort-like persistence of inequality; Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State insisted that the Ministry of Magic—that is, the state—could be a creative force rather than a bureaucratic bogeyman. Neither is quite as radical as Blakeley, but like Harry they possess moral clarity, institutional courage, and the knack for making the invisible visible.

🐍 He Who Must Not Be Named

And who, then, is Voldemort? Blakeley’s answer is chilling: not a single dark wizard but a legion of them, shards of neoliberal ideology lodged across the institutions of modern life. Each Horcrux hums with its own malign energy. One lies in the financial system — Milton Friedman’s Chicago spellbook, which convinces acolytes that markets know best. Another pulses within private equity firms, where the souls of once-healthy companies are drained for profit. A third hides inside Big Tech’s data mines, monopolising attention while preaching freedom.

Even the Ministry itself is corrupted. Treasury departments, central banks, the IMF — all those faceless bureaucracies that preach “stability” while underwriting corporate bailouts. Blakeley names this for what it is: not chaos but planned capitalism, an economy meticulously structured to socialise risk and privatise reward. Voldemort, in her telling, doesn’t conquer Hogwarts by storming the gates—he’s already on the payroll.

🧙‍♂️ The Old Wizard and the New Order

Every resistance needs a mentor. Ours is John Maynard Keynes, Dumbledore in morning dress, twinkling and urbane, reminding students that capitalism must be tamed, not worshipped. Keynes believed that human ingenuity could design institutions to manage markets for the common good. His disciples—Joan Robinson, Hyman Minsky, Paul Krugman—still carry his wand, though often without his charm. Blakeley, however, is a post-Keynesian in the literal sense: she wants to go beyond stewardship to democratisation, turning Hogwarts itself into a school run by its students.

Her proposals—worker co-ownership, public banks, participatory budgeting, the resurrection of industrial policy—are spells to redistribute not just income but power. Where Dumbledore sought balance, Blakeley seeks transformation.

🏰 The Ministry, the Media, and the Myth

In this fable, even J.K. Rowling has an analogue — not as villain, but as world-builder. Rowling is the invisible hand that determines which stories count as reality. In economic terms, that role belongs to the ideological apparatus: the think tanks, editorial boards, business schools, and PR firms that script capitalism as natural law. They are the unseen authors who tell us, over and over, that “there is no alternative.”

Blakeley’s genius is to tug at the narrative seams. She reminds readers that the economy is a story—one written by the powerful, edited by lobbyists, and distributed by compliant media. Her mission is to seize the pen.

💥 Dumbledore’s Army of the Left

Look closely and you’ll see the rest of the cast assembling. Owen Jones and Jason Hickel as Ron Weasley and Neville Longbottom, loyal and occasionally exasperated comrades. The climate movement as the new Order of the Phoenix — idealistic, fractious, but terrifying to the establishment. Even the occasional technocrat at the Bank of England might, after a long night of reading Blakeley, discover a faint scar of conscience beneath the pinstripe.

This army isn’t united by identical spells but by shared disbelief in the inevitability of the Dark Lord. They know the Ministry’s reforms are half-hearted, its audits rigged, its phoenix funds funnelled to cronies. They want new institutions—transparent, participatory, just—and they’re willing to imagine them aloud.

✨ The Moral

The wizarding world of capital runs on illusions: that profit equals virtue, that privatisation equals freedom, that inequality is a natural law. Blakeley’s Vulture Capitalism tears back the invisibility cloak. Her anger is Hermione’s anger — the frustration of someone who has done the reading and can’t understand why everyone else is still bewitched.

In her closing chapters she writes not as a revolutionary zealot but as a teacher of practical magic: how to found co-ops, reclaim utilities, and build democratic economic councils. The spells are imperfect, the alliances fragile, but the aim is clear — to replace fear with agency.

Perhaps that’s the real message of this Hogwarts analogy. There will always be Voldemorts, multiplying their Horcruxes in offshore vaults. What matters is whether enough Hermiones, Harrys, and a few repentant bureaucrats inside the Ministry decide to fight back.

Grace Blakeley reminds us that economics, like wizardry, is a matter of storytelling and courage. And somewhere between Dumbledore’s wisdom and Harry’s recklessness, between Keynes’s moderation and Blakeley’s fire, lies the possibility of a new kind of magic — the magic of democracy itself.