(AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File) Sears CEO and Board Chairman Eddie Lampert, pictured in 2004, could make billions from Sears's bankruptcy. B y now, Prospect readers probably know the basic story of the demise of Sears. The company that pioneered the 20th-century version of e-commerce—the catalog—did not succumb to 21st-century innovations like Amazon and Walmart. Rather, it was dismantled piece by piece by Eddie Lampert, the hedge fund titan (and former Yale roommate of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin) who purchased it in 2005. Lampert and his hedge fund engaged in relentless financial engineering to suck out all the value from Sears and leave a desiccated husk, which now could face possible liquidation in bankruptcy. But just how much did Lampert vacuum out? That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer, if only because of the variety of schemes he employed. Lampert was at one point simultaneously Sears’s CEO, board chairman, transaction partner, landlord, and banker. (Upon the...

(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...