BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Tells Corporate CEOs to Engage in Better Eyewash
Yves Smith, 21 January 2019
One of the sorry spectacles of modern life is having prominent individuals who profit from and serve as prime exemplars of major social ills trying to depict themselves as part of the solution, when they haven’t gone through any sort of Damascene conversion o give their virtue-signalling even a thin veneer of legitimacy. Today’s object lesson is Larry Fink, the Chairman and CEO of the ginormous fund manager BlackRock (not to be confused with the private equity/alternative asset manager Blackstone). BlackRock, with $6.2 trillion under management as of October, 2018, is the largest asset manager in the world,.
Fink became a big cheerleader of sustainability in early 2018, which makes him awfully late to this party; “environment, social, and governance” has been an investment fad for well over a decade. We’ve embedded his 2019 letter letter to CEOs at this end of this post. One imagines that Fink thinks his missive is forthright, but it doesn’t even register as either a “dare to be great” exhortation or an incisive analysis. Instead, it comes off as a rehash of Davos Man worries, with it all too evident that Fink and his fellow travelers are in comfortable denial about the rot in the foundations of the political and social order.
