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The Mutual Fund industry has been built in a sense on witchcraft. That quip is from

John Bogle's 1999 book Common Sense on Mutual Funds. Bogle had a way with words just as he had

a way of seeing the financial industry. He chafed at the idea that active managers of

traditional mutual funds possessed an alchemical power to beat the market. Instead, Bogle believed

that the only power fund managers actually had was to do worse than the market as a whole,

and to charge investors a whole lot for the courtesy of the fund's poor performance.

So instead, in 1975, John Bogle founded the Vanguard Group and pioneered the index fund,

where retail investors are more or less guaranteed overall market returns or losses,

because index funds invest across entire markets and crucially at very low cost.

Or as Bogle put it, quote, don't look for the needle in the haystack just by the haystack.

This is on point. I'm Megna Chakrabardi. Almost 50 years later, Vanguard now manages more than

$7.7 trillion in assets. It is second only to one other company, BlackRock Incorporated,

which manages more than $8.5 trillion in assets. Then comes State Street and Fidelity to other

major mutual fund companies who have approximately $4 trillion under management each.

But taken together, our guest today says these four companies control 25% of all the stock

of every publicly traded company in the United States.

Then, there are the private equity firms. It's hard to tell who their investors are,

and they successfully avoid regulation, all while taking over companies and withdrawing them from

the public eye entirely. In this category of the Kings of Concentration, we have KKR,

Apollo, Blackstone, not to be confused with BlackRock, and Carlyle, which together have more than

...