(Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP) BlackRock CEO Larry Fink speaks during a panel session at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on January 25, 2018. A new pecking order has emerged on Wall Street. Big banks remain powerful and incredibly profitable—quarterly income has hit record levels throughout 2018, largely due to benefits from the tax cuts. But a decade of financial crisis, regulatory pressures, and (most important) new investing trends has transferred power to a few dominant asset management firms. As more Americans plow retirement savings into passive funds, the buy side has overtaken the sell side . Buoyed by an index fund collection called iShares that it purchased from Barclays, BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $6.3 trillion of other people’s money under its control. BlackRock’s Aladdin risk-management system , a software tool that can track and analyze trading, monitors a whopping $18 trillion in assets for 200 financial firms; even...

AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File A building on the Express Scripts campus in Berkeley, Missouri A fter a massive corporate tax cut and widespread deregulation, there aren’t many industries fearing that the Trump administration will put them out of business—with one exception. An industry responsible for extracting billions of dollars in profits from prescription drug purchases could soon see its gravy train disappear. I’m not talking about drug manufacturers; they continue to skate by with fake concessions and half-measures. In fact, the Trump administration’s most aggressive actions on drug prices have been undertaken on behalf of Big Pharma. Sadly, that’s often how things get done in Washington, where corporate greed only gets struck down when pitted against a more powerful corporate adversary. It would be far preferable to overhaul the entire system causing drug prices to spiral out of control, but I guess you must start somewhere. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and...