Larry Fink and Making BlackRock Great Again
Going all-in on national capitalism misses where US investment growth comes from.
Larry Fink at BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit in Washington this month.
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What Larry Fink says matters. As the chief executive officer of BlackRock Inc., he controls the world’s largest pool of money, with assets under management of about $14 trillion. It’s still growing, and has sucked in an extra $1.8 trillion in new money over the last five years.
But Fink’s importance goes far beyond leading an abnormally large fund manager. He has increasingly taken on the role as capitalism’s chief defender and advocate. Starting in 2012, in annual public letters to the CEOs of all the companies in which Black Rock owns stock (a long list), he sets out his agenda for how capitalism needs to work better. The exercise is distinctly reminiscent of the annual letters Warren Buffett wrote to his shareholders until his retirement last year. But Fink’s tend to generate more controversy.