Clarice Feldman writes in THE PIPELINE
Imagine if you had billions of dollars of other peoples’ money at your disposal to invest and instead of investing it prudently to provide the maximum safest returns you can find, you decide to blow it to advance your own “environmental, social and governance”(ESG) objectives. Imagine that this virtue-signaling power trip at the expense of those to whom you owe a high degree of care, cost clients $1.7 trillion dollars in over a six-month period. Well, you don’t actually have to consider this a hypothetical, that is the story of BlackRock as I noted last month.
The question in my mind for the two years I have been warning about the loss to beneficiaries of such mismanagement is whether there will be any consequences for such conduct, and it looks as though there will be. Big time.
https://the-pipeline.org/another-bad-day-at-black-rock/
Clarice goes on to write about the coming backlash from various state attorney’s general.
Recently the state of West Virginia announced it would no longer do business with companies that boycott the fossil fuel industry—which includes BlackRock. The ban will “cost the firms $18 billion a year” according to West Virginia’s treasury office. That business loss is now potentially in the trillion-dollar range as 19 state attorneys general point to Fink’s record and assert the company he heads is “an explicit leader in the such to ‘retire fossil fuels’”. The letter to BlackRock Chairman Fink reads like a legal pleading with very extensive factual and legal citations. It begins :
https://the-pipeline.org/another-bad-day-at-black-rock/
Further in the letter.
The letter seeks a response by the 22nd of this month. The tenor of this well-documented letter and its extensive citations of fact and law lead me to believe, BlackRock will be forced to defend multiple lawsuits unless it takes significant steps to abandon both its ESG investment strategies and its extensive activities to force net-zero emissions at the expense of those whose money they manage.
https://the-pipeline.org/another-bad-day-at-black-rock/
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Blackrock has about 5 trillion dollars under management… it’s share of $18 billion isn’t going to bother it.
and clients do get a choice as to which funds to invest their assets in within their Blackrock portfolio
Something else griff knows eff all about.
Buzz off pest.
griff you are ignorant and would you would try to tell us black is white .
BlackRock did have 5 trillion dollars under management but they have just lost 1.7 trillion which even a dork like you should be able to subtract .
So now BlackRock have 3.3 Trillion dollars under management and griffy thinks thats OK .
blackrock is a real and present danger to many if not all
massive buyups of entire suburbs of homes, land and other social infrastructures give them massive sway and power. one company should NOT have such with zero controls to restrain them.
and i thought(still do ) amz goog n fkbk were bad news..
In the past, we put investment companies in a box labelled “risky” and the Reserve and other big banks as “solid and ethical”. Or something like that, depending on how badly you had been burner.
These days the boundaries between the mental boxes are fast disappearing.
Take Australia’s Reserve Bank, RBA. They have gone full mental on climate change. The worry starts if they advise policy makers and/or major investors that they need to do kind things to the environment for the benefit of the nation, of suffer pecuniary disadvantage. They seem not to be worried about the difficulties of getting correct projections from climate models, while the are heavily invested in predictive financial modelling. A prediction last year of low national interest rates for many years more has eluded this year as the RBA has enforced unexpected big interest rate hikes.
There are 4 or so Big Banks here, one of which is the old Commonwealth bank now CommBank. They have just released an extraordinarily alarmist climate change report of their own. It is not yet clear how they plan to convert their new religion into practical financial acts that affect their customers and shareholders. There used to be investment advice that banks paid low returns but were steady and hardly likely to fail.
Maybe it is a good time to clearly differentiate banks from investment houses in clear new terms. It would help if they stuck to their knitting and shut up about climate change and other diversions.
Geoff S
Very appropriate title for this story. Hopefully numerous state AG’s will kick some a.. on these low life’s like Spencer Tracy did.
I’ve had experience with Blackrock’s fund management. They lost a ton of my money this spring. Good thing I don’t have to count on it.
That’s attorneys general, it’s a plural not a general belonging to the attorney 😉