Back in 2016, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, built what amounted to a shadow government, designed to help their CEO Larry Fink become Treasury secretary in a Hillary Clinton administration. Numerous former Obama administration officials decamped to BlackRock, giving Fink the connections and expertise he needed to work his way into the Clinton Cabinet.

That Cabinet never materialized, of course, and this time around, Janet Yellen has already been given the Treasury secretary nod, as our Robert Kuttner first reported. But BlackRock’s influence in a Biden administration has not gone away. The Prospect has learned that Brian Deese, a former Obama administration official who became managing director and global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock, is the leading candidate to run the National Economic Council (NEC), a critical coordinating position at the White House.

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The issues with BlackRock don’t stop with climate. As former Sherrod Brown aide Graham Steele argues in a paper out today, asset managers with trillions in investments under their control have become “the new money trusts,” able to wield tremendous influence over our economy and our lives. BlackRock has over a 5 percent stake in more than 97.5 percent of all S&P 500 companies, and it’s so dominant in trading that the Federal Reserve hired it to manage its corporate bond purchases (predictably, a disproportionate share of those purchases went to support BlackRock’s own investment funds). Common ownership could also limit competition and weaken corporate governance, and conflicts of interest are ripe, as BlackRock leases technology to financial firms it has also invested in.