Stats › Global markets and exchanges › State ownership
State ownership of equities
Some of the largest shareholders in the world aren't investors in the ordinary sense. They're states. A central bank that ended up owning $173.8 billion of American shares because of its currency policy. Another that bought funds holding about 7% of its own stock market, as monetary policy. And a national savings fund that owns a slice of nearly every listed company on the planet.
This page is those three, with the numbers and the dates attached. The Swiss National Bank files a quarterly holdings report with the SEC exactly like any asset manager, so you can read what it owns line by line. Its reserves run 61% government bonds, 28% equities and 11% other bonds, and the equity part is now large enough that the bank's reported profit essentially follows the stock market. The Bank of Japan started selling its exchange traded funds in September 2025, at a pace that takes about 112 years to finish. And Norway's fund holds 7,201 companies across 68 countries, and has beaten its benchmark by about a quarter of a percentage point a year since 1998, which is a lesson in itself.
A warning on precision before you go further. Several of these figures are estimates rather than disclosures, and the page says so wherever that's true. The Bank of Japan publishes book value only, so every market value here is either an outside estimate or arithmetic. Sovereign wealth totals depend entirely on who is counting what. Sources and dates are all at the bottom.
Three state institutions own equities at a scale that changes how their markets work. The Swiss National Bank held $173.8 billion of US shares across 2,301 positions at the end of March 2026, filed with the SEC like any asset manager, as a by-product of currency intervention. The Bank of Japan holds exchange traded funds worth roughly 7% of the Tokyo market, and began selling in September 2025 at a pace that would take about 112 years. Norway's fund held NOK 21,268 billion at the end of 2025, of which 71.3% in equities, and owns on average 1.5% of every listed company in the world.
Members only
The rest of this page is for members
Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart and 5 named sources, roughly 1800 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.