Lew Rockwell – by F. William Engdahl
A virtually unregulated investment firm today exercises more political and financial influence than the Federal Reserve and most governments on this planet. The firm, BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, invests a staggering $9 trillion in client funds worldwide, a sum more than double the annual GDP of the Federal Republic of Germany. This colossus sits atop the pyramid of world corporate ownership, including in China most recently. Since 1988 the company has put itself in a position to de facto control the Federal Reserve, most Wall Street mega-banks, including Goldman Sachs, the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset, the Biden Administration and, if left unchecked, the economic future of our world. BlackRock is the epitome of what Mussolini called Corporatism, where an unelected corporate elite dictates top down to the population . ”
How the world’s largest “shadow bank” exercises this enormous power over the world ought to concern us. BlackRock since Larry Fink founded it in 1988 has managed to assemble unique financial software and assets that no other entity has. BlackRock’s Aladdin risk-management system, a software tool that can track and analyze trading, monitors more than $18 trillion in assets for 200 financial firms including the Federal Reserve and European central banks. He who “monitors” also knows, we can imagine. BlackRock has been called a financial “Swiss Army Knife — institutional investor, money manager, private equity firm, and global government partner rolled into one.” Yet mainstream media treats the company as just another Wall Street financial firm.
There is a seamless interface that ties the UN Agenda 2030 with the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset and the nascent economic policies of the Biden Administration. That interface is BlackRock.
Team Biden and BlackRock
By now it should be clear to anyone who bothers to look, that the person who claims to be US President, 78-year old Joe Biden, is not making any decisions. He even has difficulty reading a teleprompter or answering prepared questions from friendly media without confusing Syria and Libya or even whether he is President. He is being micromanaged by a group of handlers to maintain a scripted “image” of a President while policy is made behind the scenes by others. It eerily reminds of the 1979 Peter Sellers film character, Chauncey Gardiner, in Being There.
What is less public are the key policy persons running economic policy for Biden Inc. They are simply said, BlackRock. Much as Goldman Sachs ran economic policy under Obama and also Trump, today BlackRock is filling that key role. The deal apparently was sealed in January, 2019 when Joe Biden, then-candidate and long-shot chance to defeat Trump, went to meet with Larry Fink in New York, who reportedly told “working class Joe,” that, “I’m here to help.”
Now as President in one of his first appointees, Biden named Brian Deese to be the Director of the National Economic Council, the President’s main adviser for economic policy. One of the early Presidential Executive Orders dealt with economics and climate policy. That’s not surprising, as Deese came from Fink’s BlackRock where he was Global Head of Sustainable Investing. Before joining BlackRock, Deese held senior economic posts under Obama, including replacing John Podesta as Senior Adviser to the President where he worked alongside Valerie Jarrett. Under Obama, Deese played a key role in negotiating the Global Warming Paris Accords.
In the key policy post as Deputy Treasury Secretary under Secretary Janet Yellen, we find Nigerian-born Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo. Adeyemo also comes from BlackRock where from 2017 to 2019 he was a senior adviser and Chief of Staff to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, after leaving the Obama Administration. His personal ties to Obama are strong, as Obama named him the first President of the Obama Foundation in 2019.
And a third senior BlackRock person running economic policy in the Administration now is also unusual in several respects. Michael Pyle is the Senior Economic Adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris. He came to Washington from the position as the Global Chief Investment Strategist at BlackRock where he oversaw the strategy for investing some $9 trillion of funds. Before joining BlackRock at the highest level, he had also been in the Obama Administration as a senior adviser to the Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, and in 2015 became an adviser to the Hillary Clinton presidential bid.
The fact that three of the most influential economic appointees of the Biden Administration come from BlackRock, and before that all from the Obama Administration, is noteworthy. There is a definite pattern and suggests that the role of BlackRock in Washington is far larger than we are being told.
What is BlackRock?
Never before has a financial company with so much influence over world markets been so hidden from public scrutiny. That’s no accident. As it is technically not a bank making bank loans or taking deposits, it evades the regulation oversight from the Federal Reserve even though it does what most mega banks like HSBC or JP MorganChase do—buy, sell securities for profit. When there was a Congressional push to include asset managers such as BlackRock and Vanguard Funds under the post-2008 Dodd-Frank law as “systemically important financial institutions” or SIFIs, a huge lobbying push from BlackRock ended the threat. BlackRock is essentially a law onto itself. And indeed it is “systemically important” as no other, with possible exception of Vanguard, which is said to also be a major shareholder in BlackRock.
BlackRock founder and CEO Larry Fink is clearly interested in buying influence globally. He made former German CDU MP Friederich Merz head of BlackRock Germany when it looked as if he might succeed Chancellor Merkel, and former British Chancellor of Exchequer George Osborne as “political consultant.” Fink named former Hillary Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills to the BlackRock board when it seemed certain Hillary would soon be in the White House.
He has named former central bankers to his board and gone on to secure lucrative contracts with their former institutions. Stanley Fisher, former head of the Bank of Israel and also later Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve is now Senior Adviser at BlackRock. Philipp Hildebrand, former Swiss National Bank president, is vice chairman at BlackRock, where he oversees the BlackRock Investment Institute. Jean Boivin, the former deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, is the global head of research at BlackRock’s investment institute.
BlackRock and the Fed
It was this ex-central bank team at BlackRock that developed an “emergency” bailout plan for Fed chairman Powell in March 2019 as financial markets appeared on the brink of another 2008 “Lehman crisis” meltdown. As “thank you,” the Fed chairman Jerome Powell named BlackRock in a no-bid role to manage all of the Fed’s corporate bond purchase programs, including bonds where BlackRock itself invests. Conflict of interest? A group of some 30 NGOs wrote to Fed Chairman Powell, “By giving BlackRock full control of this debt buyout program, the Fed… makes BlackRock even more systemically important to the financial system. Yet BlackRock is not subject to the regulatory scrutiny of even smaller systemically important financial institutions.”
In a detailed report in 2019, a Washington non-profit research group, Campaign for Accountability, noted that, “BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, implemented a strategy of lobbying, campaign contributions, and revolving door hires to fight off government regulation and establish itself as one of the most powerful financial companies in the world.”
The New York Fed hired BlackRock in March 2019 to manage its commercial mortgage-backed securities program and its $750 billion primary and secondary purchases of corporate bonds and ETFs in no-bid contracts. US financial journalists Pam and Russ Martens in critiquing that murky 2019 Fed bailout of Wall Street remarked, “for the first time in history, the Fed has hired BlackRock to “go direct” and buy up $750 billion in both primary and secondary corporate bonds and bond ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds), a product of which BlackRock is one of the largest purveyors in the world.” They went on, “Adding further outrage, the BlackRock-run program will get $75 billion of the $454 billion in taxpayers’ money to eat the losses on its corporate bond purchases, which will include its own ETFs, which the Fed is allowing it to buy…”
Fed head Jerome Powell and Larry Fink know each other well, apparently. Even after Powell gave BlackRock the hugely lucrative no-bid “go direct” deal, Powell continued to have the same BlackRock manage an estimated $25 million of Powell’s private securities investments. Public records show that in this time Powell held direct confidential phone calls with BlackRock CEO Fink. According to required financial disclosure, BlackRock managed to double the value of Powell’s investments from the year before! No conflict of interest, or?