The Free Market That Isn’t: How Centralized Financial Control Replaced Capitalism

Op-ed by Mexus

For decades, we’ve been told that globalization and free markets would democratize opportunity — that open competition would lift innovation, efficiency, and prosperity. Yet, beneath the surface of that promise lies a contradiction even the father of neoliberal thought, Friedrich Hayek, warned about: when markets lose their regulators and moral boundaries, economic freedom mutates into a new form of control.

From Capitalism to Concentration

Today, most of what we call the “market” is no longer a landscape of competing entrepreneurs. It’s an archipelago of corporate giants — and behind them, a handful of institutional investors pulling the financial strings. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street together manage more than $20 trillion in assets, and between them hold significant stakes in nearly every major company on the planet — from food and energy to tech, media, and transportation.

It’s not technically a monopoly. It’s something subtle, and more dangerous: common ownership. The same investors own pieces of all the competitors. Nestlé and PepsiCo? Shared investors. Exxon and Chevron? Shared investors. Netflix and Disney? Shared investors. The “free market” begins to look less like a competitive arena and more like a financial kingdom, ruled not by kings but by asset managers.

The Irony Hayek Would Recognize

Hayek’s neoliberal vision trusted that decentralized markets would check the power of the state. What he feared — and what has quietly arrived — is the concentration of power in private hands without accountability. When governments step back, believing regulation stifles freedom, the vacuum fills with something far less democratic: financial oligarchy.

Unlike governments, these institutions are unelected, untransparent, and borderless. Their influence extends through investment algorithms and voting shares, not legislation or consent. Yet their decisions shape wages, production, trade routes, even cultural narratives. It’s capitalism stripped of competition — efficiency without ethics, scale without soul.

A Market That Owns Itself

What’s most disturbing is how this concentration hides behind our everyday habits. Every paycheck invested in a 401(k) or index fund feeds the same cycle of consolidation. Millions of ordinary people, seeking stability, have inadvertently ceded ownership of the global economy to a handful of fund managers.

The result is not a market of equals but an ecosystem of dependencies. Small businesses can’t compete. Governments bend to credit ratings. Consumers face the illusion of choice — dozens of brands on the shelf, all owned by the same few conglomerates.

When the Same Few Own Everything

Institutional investors now dominate virtually every key sector:

• Food & Water: BlackRock and Vanguard hold top stakes in Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Unilever — the corporations behind most supermarket brands. They also hold shares in major water utilities and bottling firms, meaning the same investors who profit from soda sales also profit from selling you “clean” water.

• Health & Beauty: The same funds own large chunks of Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and L’Oréal — controlling everything from baby shampoo to prescription drugs.

• Entertainment & Media: BlackRock and Vanguard are among the largest shareholders in Disney, Comcast, Warner Bros Discovery, Netflix, and even Fox — which means competing networks answer to the same financial interests. Ruki is also part of their financial umbrella.

• Energy & Transportation: They dominate ownership in Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Ford, and General Motors, effectively linking fossil fuel producers and car manufacturers under the same financial umbrella.

• Real Estate: Through subsidiaries and investment arms, the same funds have spent the last decade buying entire neighborhoods, turning housing into a financial asset class. BlackRock’s and Vanguard’s property funds now own thousands of homes across the U.S., often outbidding families with cash offers.

• Healthcare: From UnitedHealth to CVS Health, hospital systems and insurance conglomerates are likewise held by the same investors who hold stakes in the pharmaceutical giants that supply them.

The pattern is the same everywhere: consolidation equals concentration. It’s not technically a monopoly — it’s worse. It’s the end of competition through what economists call common ownership — where the same investors quietly own all the supposed rivals.

The New Financial Kingdom

Unlike governments, these institutions are not elected and rarely visible. They operate through fund managers, proxy votes, and “sustainability policies,” exerting soft power over executives and entire industrie.

They decide whether companies prioritize short-term stock performance, what “social goals” get corporate attention, and even how firms talk about climate change or labor. Their influence is global, but their accountability is none.

And while the world’s financiers compete to outbuild one another ever-taller skyscrapers as symbols and monuments to progress,, private equity firms (also mabged by them) quietly dismantle the foundations of the real economy — buying, stripping, and reselling what remains of once-productive industries.

It’s a financial kingdom, a network of stewards managing assets for millions of ordinary people who have no real say in how their money shapes the world. The irony is sharp: in chasing retirement security, the public has unwittingly handed over control of capitalism itself.

Hayek’s Warning

Hayek argued that true freedom required both competition and rules — guardrails that prevent power from concentrating. Neoliberal policymakers took only half his lesson: they removed the state but forgot the safeguards. The invisible hand, unregulated, didn’t create balance — it created a fist.

Now we live in an era where the “market” decides who eats, where we live, and what we see or believe. Ownership is global, but decision-making is concentrated in a few hands, headquartered in New York, Boston, and London.

Reviving the Real Free Market

If capitalism is to survive, it must return to its roots — to decentralization, entrepreneurship, and accountability. That requires re-regulating ownership, taxing speculation, and protecting productive markets from financial domination.

Otherwise, we are not participants in the market but subjects of it.
And what we call a “free economy” will remain a global financial monarchy — efficient, powerful, and utterly undemocratic.

The Need for Re-Regulation and Renewal

Hayek warned that markets required clear rules to prevent the rise of monopolistic or coercive power. That warning went unheeded. “Neoliberalism” became a slogan for deregulation, not balance. And without balance, the invisible hand has curled into a fist.

Re-democratizing the economy doesn’t mean rejecting capitalism; it means reviving it. Capitalism was never meant to be the concentration of ownership in three firms’ portfolios. It was meant to reward creativity, risk, and enterprise — values incompatible with a system where the same institutions quietly own everything.

If democracy depends on dispersed power, then so does economic freedom. Without it, what we call the “free market” is no longer free — it’s a global trust run by custodians of capital, accountable only to themselves. And that, as Hayek foresaw, is the road not to liberty but to servitude.