Powerful financial behemoth growing in power and influence at highest levels.
By Donald Jeffries
BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $6.3 trillion of individual investments under its control. It has been dubbed by some as “the new Goldman Sachs.” Since 2004, BlackRock has hired a large number of former government officials and powerful bankers, leading to obvious potential conflicts of interest. CEO Larry Fink has ties to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Former BlackRock executive Craig Phillips, now a Treasury Department official, has been leading the efforts to keep the investment fund’s trillions outside of Dodd-Frank regulations.
BlackRock, which also handles Mexico’s pension funds, has deep connections to the former Enrique Peña Nieto administration. BlackRock holds financial stakes in Mexico’s toll roads, hospitals, gas pipelines, prisons, and other infrastructure. Nieto opened up PEMEX, his country’s state-run oil monopoly, to private investment. BlackRock promptly secured $1 billion in energy projects. The son of Carlos Slim, Mexico’s richest man and one of the wealthiest people in the world, sits on BlackRock’s board. BlackRock essentially invested Mexican pension funds into its infrastructure projects. The recent election of leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador may threaten BlackRock’s hold in Mexico. AMLO, as he is popularly referred to, has called BlackRock “the white-collar financial mafia.” However, after meeting with Fink, AMLO softened his tone considerably.
If and when Joe Biden does assume the presidency, his cabinet will have at least two key positions filled by BlackRock officials. One of these, Fink’s former chief of staff, Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, is currently president of the Obama Foundation. While Fink is a typical mainstream liberal on the surface, BlackRock’s investments in private prisons and weapons manufacturers have made him the focus of protests and demands that he be removed from the board of the New York Museum of Modern Art. Brian Deese, another BlackRock name connected to a potential Biden administration, was a former adviser to Obama and has overseen Fink’s longtime efforts to make climate change a focal point for BlackRock.
The Campaign for Accountability, an anti-corruption watchdog group, has established the BlackRock Transparency Project, to further scrutinize the organization’s access, influence, and incestuous relationship with government officials. Zealous Trump impeachment advocate Rep. Adam Schiff is linked to BlackRock, as well, and the fund is even connected to the Ukrainian scandals involving both Joe and Hunter Biden. Thomas Donilon, a former national security adviser to Obama and the managing director of BlackRock Investment Institute, is one name that was mentioned during the probe into money laundering from Burisma, the giant gas company in the Ukraine whose board Hunter Biden sat on.
WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL COMPANY?
BlackRock has been called “the most powerful institution in the financial system,” “the most powerful company in the world,” and “the fourth branch of government.” In August 2019, BlackRock executives presented a proposal at the annual meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyo. They urged that the bankers break longstanding tradition and combine monetary policy with fiscal policy. They proposed the establishment of a “Standing Emergency Fiscal Facility” that could be activated when “interest rate manipulation was no longer working to avoid deflation.” This “facility” would be headed by an “independent expert” appointed by the central bank. As it benefited so many other elite forces, the Covid-19 crisis was a godsend to BlackRock. In March 2020, it was awarded a no-bid contract under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), to deploy a $454 billion slush fund established by the Treasury Department in partnership with the Federal Reserve. This fund would have the capability of providing over $4 trillion in Federal Reserve credit.
BLACKROCK’S ORIGINS
BlackRock was formed in 1988, in a partnership with multinational private equity firm the Blackstone Group. After the 2008 banking crisis, the Blackstone Group gobbled up foreclosed properties at rock bottom prices and rented them at inflated rates. BlackRock made its mark in the 1990s by promoting the mortgage-backed securities that would help cause the economic crisis of 2008. They also specialized in buying up so-called “toxic assets,” which the Federal Reserve was prohibited from doing. The bulk of BlackRock’s success, however, came from “exchange traded funds” which provided them with nearly $2 trillion in assets. Epitomizing the monopolistic consolidation of power prevalent everywhere across the globe, these “exchange traded funds” now comprise almost half of all stock investments. BlackRock is one of just three giant companies controlling these funds, along with Vanguard and State Street. These “big three” have become the largest shareholder in some 90% of S&P 500 firms, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, and General Electric. BlackRock is also significantly invested in the mainstream media.
Investigate Europe—a group of dedicated journalists—noted that BlackRock “undermines competition through owning shares in competing companies, blurs boundaries between private capital and government affairs by working closely with regulators, and advocates for privatization of pension schemes in order to channel savings capital into its own funds.”
Expect to be hearing more about BlackRock in the future, especially if Mr. Biden occupies the White House for the next few years.
Donald Jeffries is a highly respected author and researcher whose work on the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and other high crimes of the Deep State has been read by millions of people across the world. Jeffries is also the author of three books currently being sold by the AFP Online Store.
