yego.me
yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

BlackRock - The company that owns the world?

2m read
·Feb 9, 2025

Narrator: There's a good chance you've never heard of BlackRock. Founded in only 1988 in less than 30 years this American financial firm would grow to become "the company that owns the world" managing assets worth 6,3 trillion dollars.

These are assets that belong to their clients mainly the pension funds of ordinary people: Teachers, police officers, nurses and many more. And that's just the beginning.

Blackrock has also developed a software platform called Aladdin to perform risk analysis for its clients. It receives sensitive data from banks, insurance companies and other important institutions. Through Aladdin, BlackRock has insights about the management of financial assets worth another 20 trillion dollars.

BlackRock also has shares and voting rights in many of the biggest European companies in sectors such as energy, oil and gas, transportation, food and of course finance. The company holds public debt in the form of bonds and has real estate interests. And still there's more.

Our rock, you see, wears many hats. Aside from being an investor it is also an auditor and an advisor.

Governments and central banks invite a Blackrock subsidiary called "Blackrock Solutions" to audit them and to provide advice about the management and rescue of banks. Yet at the same time BlackRock is often a major shareholder in these same banks. In other words, the company often sits on both sides of the table.

Blackrock Solutions gets privileged access to highly sensitive information information that could be valuable to BlackRock itself. Does this constitute a conflict of interest?

"No", says BlackRock which claims that the company has established "Chinese Walls" between its different subsidiaries. In January 2018, BlackRock's founder and chairman Larry Fink sent a letter to all of the CEOs of the companies BlackRock is invested in asking them to do more than deliver financial performance and make a... "positive contribution to society".

So BlackRock not only owns the world... it also wants to save it?

Capturing the Beauty of Africa’s Wildlife and Fighting to Save It | Nat Geo Live
Sunni and Shia Islam part 2 | World History | Khan Academy

More Articles

View All
Daylight Saving Time Explained
Every year some countries move their clocks forward in the spring only to move them back in the autumn. To the vast majority of the world who doesn’t participate in this odd clock fiddling, it seems a baffling thing to do. So what’s the reason behind it? …
Multivariable chain rule intuition
So, in the last video, I introduced this multi-variable chain rule, and here, I want to explain a loose intuition for why it’s true, why you would expect something like this to happen. The way you think about an expression like this, you have this multiv…
World War I: Homefront | Period 7: 1890-1945 | AP US History | Khan Academy
In 1917, the United States entered World War One on the side of the Allies. After several years of neutrality, Woodrow Wilson, who was serving as president of the United States at the time, even campaigned for re-election on the slogan “He kept us out of …
Graphing exponential growth & decay | Mathematics I | High School Math | Khan Academy
This is from the graph basic exponential functions on KH Academy, and they ask us to graph the following exponential function. They give us the function ( H(x) = 27 \cdot \left(\frac{1}{3}\right)^x ). So our initial value is 27, and ( \frac{1}{3} ) is our…
How AIs, like ChatGPT, Learn
On the internet, the algorithms are all around you. You are watching this video because an algorithm brought it to you (among others) to click, which you did, and the algorithm took note. When you open the TweetBook, the algorithm decides what you see. Wh…
Natural hazards | Earth and society | Middle school Earth and space science | Khan Academy
Before I go to a new place, I tried to do some thorough research about it. What do I want to do there? What’s the weather forecast? What’s the chance that it might erupt? I learned this the hard way recently while preparing for a trip to Mount Rainier Nat…