During the most recent French general election, a Senate commission’s conservative president and communist rapporteur jointly attacked the “influence of consultancies on public policy” in President Emmanuel Macron’s government. That morning, as Macron was meeting voters, one yelled “McKinsey” at him until being escorted away. At the time I was in a provincial Auvergnat town, where “Vote McKinsey” had been angrily scrawled over the president’s posters.

Some months later in the United States, veteran journalists Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe published a 350-page investigation into the world’s oldest and largest consulting giant. Reviewer Laleh Khalili describes it as “a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions . . . and increased worker exploitation.”

Economists Rosie Collington and Mariana Mazzucato return to this ground in their new book The Big Con — excoriating McKinsey, its close peers Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company, and a host of similar firms. The authors race through a medley of involvement in misconduct — price gouging vital medicines; corruption in South Africa and Angola; forest destruction from Brazil to Guyana; ICE detention camps; the asset-stripping of public services from health care to railways; brutal economic restructures of struggling economies; mass layoffs; tax-dodging; the 2008 crash; and the Enron scandal, to name a few. One quickly gains the impression that there isn’t a single major act of state or corporate malevolence in our lifetimes free of the big consultancies’ fingerprints.