He says what I didn’t! Good impassioned analysis of the subject —
Filed under: video | Tagged: bailout, BlackRock, covid-19, exchange-traded funds, Federal Reserve, shutdown | 4 Comments »
Last American Vagabond expounds on my BlackRock article and interview
Posted on July 18, 2020 by Ellen Brown
Two video interviews — on RT America and Kim Iverson
Posted on July 11, 2020 by Ellen Brown
Filed under: videos | Tagged: bailouts, BlackRock, Federal Reserve, public banking, shutdown | 4 Comments »
Meet BlackRock, the New Great Vampire Squid
Posted on June 22, 2020 by Ellen Brown
BlackRock is a global financial giant with customers in 100 countries and its tentacles in major asset classes all over the world; and it now manages the spigots to trillions of bailout dollars from the Federal Reserve. The fate of a large portion of the country’s corporations has been put in the hands of a megalithic private entity with the private capitalist mandate to make as much money as possible for its owners and investors; and that is what it has proceeded to do.
To most people, if they are familiar with it at all, BlackRock is an asset manager that helps pension funds and retirees manage their savings through “passive” investments that track the stock market. But working behind the scenes, it is much more than that. BlackRock has been called “the most powerful institution in the financial system,” “the most powerful company in the world” and the “secret power.” It is the world’s largest asset manager and “shadow bank,” larger than the world’s largest bank (which is in China), with over $7 trillion in assets under direct management and another $20 trillion managed through its Aladdin risk-monitoring software. BlackRock has also been called “the fourth branch of government” and “almost a shadow government”, but no part of it actually belongs to the government. Despite its size and global power, BlackRock is not even regulated as a “Systemically Important Financial Institution” under the Dodd-Frank Act, thanks to pressure from its CEO Larry Fink, who has long had “cozy” relationships with government officials. Continue reading
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary | Tagged: bailouts, BlackRock, CARES Act, ETFs, exchange-traded funds, Federal Reserve, Nationalize the Fed, public banking, US Treasury, wall street | 60 Comments »
Blackstone, BlackRock or a Public Bank? Putting California’s Funds to Work
Posted on May 26, 2018 by Ellen Brown
California has over $700 billion parked in private banks earning minimal interest, private equity funds that contributed to the affordable housing crisis, or shadow banks of the sort that caused the banking collapse of 2008. These funds, or some of them, could be transferred to an infrastructure bank that generated credit for the state – while the funds remained safely on deposit in the bank.
California needs over $700 billion in infrastructure during the next decade. Where will this money come from? The $1.5 trillion infrastructure initiative unveiled by President Trump in February 2018 includes only $200 billion in federal funding, and less than that after factoring in the billions in tax cuts in infrastructure-related projects. The rest is to come from cities, states, private investors and public-private partnerships (PPPs) one. And since city and state coffers are depleted, that chiefly means private investors and PPPs, which have a shady history at best. Continue reading
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary | Tagged: BlackRock, Blackstone, California Infrastructure Bank, CalPERS, CalSTRS, public banking | 15 Comments »
WEB OF DEBT BLOG 
Conservation or Land Grab? The Financialization of Nature
Just in time for the UN’s policy push for “30 x 30” – 30% of the earth to be “conserved” by 2030 – a new Wall Street asset class puts up for sale the processes underpinning all life.
A month before the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP26) kicked off in Scotland, a new asset class was launched by the New York Stock Exchange that will “open up a new feeding ground for predatory Wall Street banks and financial institutions that will allow them to dominate not just the human economy, but the entire natural world.” So writes Whitney Webb in an article titled “Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class”:
Continue reading →Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary | Tagged: 30 X 30 BIDEN BILL GATES BIODIVERSITY BLACKROCK CONSERVATION COP15 COP26 ELLEN BROWN FEATURED INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK INTRINSIC EXCHANGE GROUP LANDGRAB LANDOWNERS NATURE NATURE ECONOMY ROCKEFE, Bill Gates, biodiversity, BlackRock, CONSERVATION, COP15, COP26, Ellen Brown, LANDGRAB, LANDOWNERS, NATURE, ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION, wall street | 16 Comments »