(This is a compilation of online reports by others). There's a good chance you have never heard of BlackRock. Perhaps that is because BlackRock owns 30% of CNN and large parts of many media organizations, and prefers to operate under the radar of publicity. The reality is that in less than 30 years, this American financial firm has grown from nothing to becoming the world's largest manager of other people's money. BlackRock makes most of its money handling investments for outside clients, mostly institutions like public pension plans, endowments, and foundations. Nearly 60% of its overall assets under management are for institutional investors, most of which are products linked to stock markets. BlackRock has the largest clientele as compared to any other investment company in the world and has a stake in popular companies such as Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) as of Q1 2022. People are slowly catching on to the fact that the world is controlled by perhaps 12 families, with the likes of the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, et al, often touted as having dominion over huge, covert empires whose true wealth and influence is expertly shielded from prying eyes. So who actually owns the world? As always when it comes to such overarching questions, we need to follow the money. That involves looking at inventory, specifically at the world’s largest banks to establish who the shareholders are and thus who really calls the shots: The Official Institutions Group (OIG) partners with central banks, sovereign wealth funds, finance ministries, future generation funds and multilateral organizations, offering the gamut of customized solutions and global investment management, risk management and advisory services. As of January 2021, the Official Institutions Group has $579bn in assets under management (AUM) on behalf of 109 clients globally. This includes 45 Central Banks. The American economy is lumbering under monopoly and oligopoly. In many industries, from airlines to internet advertising to health care to banks to mobile phone providers, Americans can do business with just a handful of companies. As the journalist David Dayen has argued, this increasing market concentration reduces consumer choice, raises prices and most likely harms workers. Einer Elhauge, of Harvard Law School, has written that concentrated ownership “poses the greatest anti competitive threat of our time, mainly because it is the one anti competitive problem we are doing nothing about.” After introducing mutual funds into China, BlackRock told its clients to invest in the country, pushing billions of dollars into the world's second-largest economy. It is the first foreign-owned, asset management company based outside of China that has received approval from Chinese President Xi Jinping to start a mutual fund business in the country. While a good relationship with China may be lucrative for the company, Consumers' Research says BlackRock has "turned a blind eye to the CCP’s malign behavior and worse, sending American pensions to China to support it…BlackRock has shown that its relationship with the CCP is more important than America’s national security interests." While it is illegal for U.S. investors to own direct shares of Chinese firms, "investors in BlackRock’s funds own shares of shell companies set up in places like the Cayman Islands that have profit sharing agreements with Chinese companies," the Consumer Warning reads. BlackRock Inc., the largest money management corporation not only in America but the world, has emerged as a big promoter of social and environmental investing and of sending billions of U.S. dollars to China. BlackRock Fund Advisors owns 2.66 million shares of Google, 6% of Amazon, 7% of Starbucks, 4.5% of MicroSoft , 6.9% of Goldman Sachs and 6.5% of Apple. The top shareholders of Disney are Robert A. Iger, Christine M. McCarthy, Alan N. Braverman, Vanguard Group Inc., and BlackRock Inc. As of March 2022, BlackRock was the world's largest mutual fund company, with around 10.01 trillion U.S. dollars of assets under management (AUM). Rounding out the top three were Vanguard with 8.1 trillion U.S. dollars of AUM, and Charles Schwab with 7.98 trillion U.S. dollars of AUM. The Vanguard Group, Inc. is currently the largest shareholder in BlackRock, with 8.1% of shares outstanding. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 7.7% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 5.3% by the third-largest shareholder. Clearly, when you look at who owns the world, it is a convoluted trail of management fiduciaries who cross breed and have no qualms about flouting regional or national rules and regulations, or exploiting seams in employee protections or environmental protections, while simultaneously "virtue signaling" marginal efforts to "invest" in ESG oriented businesses. |
Archives
April 2024
|