Private Equity controls $12 Trillion, Black Rock $5 Trillion. Do we stand a chance?

[bucolic_frolic]

Once everything is owned or managed, will our lives matter? We won't really own anything, we just use or rent it.

Or course, to the contrary, could the same be said of the common laborer in 1794 in relation to the Founding Fathers and their country estates? Maybe I'm just looking at it incorrectly.

[Think. Again.]

1. As I see it...

...the biggest problem with concentrated wealth is the control over all aspects of the way the human race progresses.

Rather than our continued development being guided by the needs and desires of our species itself, as a whole, our path forward is artificially commanded by the personal insights and urges of a very small handful of people who are only experiencing a very small snaphot of time in the human journey, and have very personal goals to achieve.

That's a very scary reality.

[gab13by13]

2. Last I checked

BlackRock was a major shareholder in CNN and MSNBC.

[werdna]

3. I don't know major from minor investment ratios but -

Blackrock and Vanguard have 12% of cnn and 13% of msnbc.

[Midnight Writer]

4. We don't stand a chance unless we stop letting them divide us.

How that will come about is beyond me.

So many of our citizens seem primed to fall for any bullshit slogan. So many seem determined to work against their own best interests.

A prime example is Reaganomics. I, to this day, talk to conservatives that swear that Reagan's tax cuts lowered our deficit and that more money for the wealthy means that wealth will trickle down to the workers. This is "The Big Lie" in my book.

[A HERETIC I AM]

5. There's a couple things to keep in mind about the likes of the Blackrocks of the world...

and that is they are money MANAGERS and are PUBLICLY TRADED, as opposed to wealth funds or private equity funds. They manage money for investors, both individual and institutional and are by law, required to provide much more transparency than a Private Equity Fund does..

Sure, they have a shitload under management, but the investments they make and the shares they buy are held by various types of FUNDS and ETF's which in turn are held by individual investors as well as institutional investors like Pension Funds, Insurance Companies, etc. Way too much has been made of them of late, as if Black Rock is some giant boogyman looking to buy out and control the entire world. It's silly. Other people and institutions own what they buy, NOT Black Rock. Because of what they do they are heavily regulated and virtually everything they buy and sell is a matter of public record. You just have to be willing to slog though pages and pages of financial documents to find it out.

The concern should be focused on their buying power. They can use their leverage to sink or swim, if you'll allow me the reference, a given publicly traded company. They have the resources to purchase enormous blocks of shares and as a result, significantly affect the share price. But at the end of the day (literally at the end of the trading day), those shares are attached to various ETF's and Mutual Funds.

This concern is something that the SEC is charged with enforcing. But of course their teeth have been pulled by conservative influences in public policy, because god dammit, we just can't allow those pesky plebes like the average American to have a say, now can we?

But there is a way to reign them in.

VOTE.

BLUE.

NO.

MATTER.

WHO.

[bucolic_frolic]

6. Larry Fink's private index dream may be holy grail

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/larry-finks-private-index-dream-may-be-holy-grail-2024-09-19/

LONDON, Sept 19 (Reuters Breakingviews) - BlackRock’s (BLK.N), opens new tab status as an asset-management behemoth stems from the success of passive investing, where customers buy an index rather than picking stocks or fund managers. It’s therefore notable that founder Larry Fink sees the chance for a similar revolution in alternative assets like buyout funds. His chief financial officer even said
, opens new tab that private-market index products could be one of the most attractive opportunities in the company’s history. The reality, however, looks messy.
Fink’s recent $3.2 billion purchase of private-markets data provider Preqin raises a tantalising idea. Could BlackRock, which is synonymous with the rapid growth in index products like exchange-traded funds, repeat the trick for private equity and direct lending? Fink has talked up the potential for indexing to aid the “democratization
, opens new tab” of private markets.
There’s lots at stake for BlackRock, whose index business now manages around $5 trillion of assets. One problem facing Fink’s core business is that public tracker funds are increasingly commoditised and low margin. Meanwhile, the companies who compile the underlying benchmarks, like S&P Global (SPGI.N), and LSEG’s (LSEG.L), FTSE Russell, gobble up a large chunk of the fees.

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