BlackRock Doesn’t Need to Roll Like a Blackstone
The firm shouldn’t feel an urgency to chase private equity deals like the rest of Wall Street.
The business it has is already a gem.
Photographer: Bess Adler/BloombergBlackRock would like to know how it feels to roll like a Blackstone. CEO Larry Fink, though, might be better off leaving that as a great unknown.
On Tuesday, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, announced its largest management reshuffle in years. The executive moves come after layoffs in January that cut 3 percent of the firm’s staff, its largest headcount reduction in years. BlackRock has struggled lately. Shares fell 24 percent last year, significantly more than the market. Assets under management in the last three months of 2018 dipped nearly $500 billion, to less than $6 trillion for the first time since mid-2017. Bloomberg recently reported that BlackRock’s U.S. exchange-traded fund business, while still the industry’s largest, attracted fewer assets in the first three months of the year than rival Vanguard.