Why big banks may end up buying your city’s public water system

From AlterNet:

Water is the new oil for global financial powerhouses and water is being commoditized and traded in global stock exchanges.

Today in addition to being able to buy water rights and purchase lakes on private land, an individual or a corporation can invest in water-targeted hedge funds, index funds and exchange-traded funds (EFTs), water certificates, shares of water engineering and technology companies, shares of multinational private water utilities, shares of multinational banks and investment banks that own water companies, and a host of other newfangled water investments in this U.S.$425 billion industry which is expected to become a U.S.$1 trillion industry within five years. And if one happens to be a tycoon, one can also create his or her own private water districts and water utilities.

The recent media coverage on water has centered on individual corporations and super-investors seeking to control water by buying up water rights and water utilities. But paradoxically the hidden story is a far more complicated one. The real story of the global water sector is a convoluted one involving “interlocking globalized capital”: Wall Street and global investment firms, banks, and other elite private-equity firms — often transcending national boundaries to partner with each other, with banks and hedge funds, with technology corporations and insurance giants, with regional public-sector pension funds, and with sovereign wealth funds — are moving rapidly into the water sector to buy up not only water rights and water-treatment technologies, but also to privatize public water utilities and infrastructure.

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