At the end of last year, asset management firm BlackRock broke a new record: it surpassed $10 trillion in the assets it manages. To put that sum in context, it’s larger than the pre-pandemic GDP of Germany and Japan combined.

Yet BlackRock isn’t the only behemoth asset manager in operation today. They’re followed closely by Vanguard, with just over $7 trillion in assets, and a small cohort of peers including Fidelity and State Street in the $4 trillion range. BlackRock and Vanguard alone control enough assets to buy every company listed in the London Stock Exchange at least three times over.

Indeed, the combined $20 trillion in assets of the two firms represents a full fifth of the assets of an entire $100 trillion global industry spanning thousands of firms. This is a profound degree of concentration in a vast and powerful industry. It’s also a recent phenomenon, whose implications for political and economic power and the operating logics of contemporary capitalism we’ve barely begun to recognize, let alone address.