Throughout the coronavirus crisis, notice of rising economic inequality has hardly been restricted to the pages of Jacobin and other radical outlets: NBC has shown concern about runaway wealth amid spiking poverty, while CBS has given airtime to outrage over the swelling fortunes of the world’s billionaires. But while everyone understands that the pandemic is widening the gap between the rich and the rest, the mechanisms by which the rich get richer remain both difficult for the public to understand and shrouded in secrecy.

In their new paper “Profiting on Crisis: How Predatory Financial Investors Have Worsened Inequality in the Coronavirus Crisis,” Megan Tobias Neely and Donna Carmichael explain how the shadow banking industry both profits from the present crisis and exacerbates it. Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke with Megan Tobias Neely, sociologist and assistant professor of organization at the Copenhagen Business School, about what shadow banks are, how their behavior set the stage for the crisis, and how they’ve made the most of everyone else’s misfortune.