Interesting article on the dawn of the BlackRock Era. The world’s largest asset manager is poised for overwhelming influence no matter who wins the next presidential election.
In recent years, we’ve been living in the Goldman Sachs era. The list of former high-level Goldman Sachs employees who held high-level government offices in the most recent decade is lengthy.
BlackRock is the world’s biggest asset manager, handling $7.4 trillion in customer assets. It’s twice as profitable as Goldman. BlackRock is part money manager, part institutional investor, part software platform, and part government partner. It’s a pioneer in junk bonds, and has often been referred to as the world’s largest shadow bank.
In March, the Federal Reserve announced that it had tapped BlackRock to serve as an investment adviser and asset manager for multiple debt-buying programs on behalf of the U.S. central bank as part of the CARES Act bailout program, a money pot worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
That decision put BlackRock on both sides of a multitrillion-dollar bailout windfall: As Bloomberg reported, “Under the arrangement [BlackRock] could buy some of its own funds on behalf of the central bank.
BlackRock employees managing the Fed’s $750 billion corporate credit facility are permitted to trade on the information they’ve learned in advising the Fed after just two weeks of “cooling off.
That regulatory standard means that the firm and its individual traders are primed to benefit massively and legally from insider knowledge of what’s been by far the most robust and efficient component of the bailout so far.
https://prospect.org/economy/the-daw...blackrock-era/