This chapter explores the role of alternative investment funds in the recent financial crisis. It considers the different ways in which the source of private equity and hedge fund success during the boom were understood, contrasting the positions of supporters and critics. In contrast to these positions, the chapter reframes private equity and hedge funds as a mutable, integral part of the world of bricolage described in 2. It is argued that these intermediaries were bricoleurs building structures from conjunctural conditions of low interest rates and abundant liquidity in the 2000s. Yet...

This chapter explores the role of alternative investment funds in the recent financial crisis. It considers the different ways in which the source of private equity and hedge fund success during the boom were understood, contrasting the positions of supporters and critics. In contrast to these positions, the chapter reframes private equity and hedge funds as a mutable, integral part of the world of bricolage described in 2. It is argued that these intermediaries were bricoleurs building structures from conjunctural conditions of low interest rates and abundant liquidity in the 2000s. Yet there was something distinctive about their strategy which we understand outside the market frame through the Deleuzian analogy of ‘nomadic war machine’. The chapter concludes by arguing that it is not fixed strategies that generate reward, but rewards which drive variable tactics of value extraction which often impose costs on others.