Corporate financialization in the age of asset managers: Emerging traits of financial imperialism

This article contributes to the literature on corporate financialization by examining the role of asset man- agers. Although these new capitalist enterprises have been an object of investigation, a clear understanding of their importance at the global scale, penetration across industries, ramification across firms, and system- wide implications remains an evolving area of research. With these aims, we first highlight three shifts in the contemporary organization of finance associated with the rise of asset management: the weakening of finance’s intermediation function, the change in the locus of financial influence, and the reconfiguration of the mechanisms underpinning contemporary imperialism. We then provide a newly compiled dataset that maps the ownership stakes of the asset management industry within the universe of billion-dollar companies between 2013 and 2025 and quantify how large current levels of common ownership, that originates from asset managers’ holdings, are in the global corporate sector. Accounting for market and relative investor concentration, and overlapping ownership, we show that the capacity of asset management to influence vir- tually every aspect of production and investment has grown exponentially over time, spanning industries, sectors, and macro-regions. Given our empirical analysis, we provide new evidence that the pervasiveness of common ownership driven by portfolio managers has first-order implications for the restructuring of U.S. hegemonic power in the post-2008 global economic order.