Student activists garner more headlines than pensioners. And maybe that's a good thing. : Capital markets are the oxygen of our economy, as GreenFin adviser and Harvard Extension School instructor Graham Sinclair has told me. Sticking with his corporeal comparison, asset owners may be the diaphragm, maintaining a steady flow of oxygen with a long-term interest in keeping the whole system alive. But asset owners are not a monolith in scale, substance or influence. As a primer, Asset owners are: pension funds, insurance company general accounts, outsourced CIOs, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), family offices, endowments and foundations.