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 »
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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 »