Northvolt raises $1.2B convertible note from BlackRock
sifted.eu
sifted.eu
But they are often assembled in USA from foreign components, so you have to dig further into what cells they’re using.
https://northvolt.com/products/
scroll down to footer PRODUCTS heading for more vague marketing splurge.
In general, it seems more common in China for companies to do business with each other via e.g. Alibaba. You can actually order non trivial amounts of raw materials via Alibaba. For example if you search for 1080 steel, you can actually order tons of steel from various suppliers.
There are only a few companies that actually manufacture their cells in the USA.
But not really consumer products either.
The only retail product we offer at the moment is:
https://northvolt.com/products/systems/voltpacks/mobile/
and I am not even sure you can just outright buy it or only lease it
You can't just ship by mail such big cells due to fire hazards so I don't expect you will be able to just buy one
Feels like BlackRock have touched almost everything
'I produce nothing, I do nothing, I own'.
Having said that, Blackstone/rock has grown far too much. People need to stop sending their money to their index funds.
How?
Private equity takes active ownership in the companies they own, unlike BlackRock that invests and at most takes a few board seats.
There is no way to own something without being all over it.
Especially if you outsource the management of it, you now have to watch your money managers like a hawk and also accept a lower rate of return.
Less so when you've captured government and setting|opposing policy at Senate|POTUS level (in US, in a similar manner elsewhere) to worsen health insurance and housing access to your own benefit.
The Ruling Class S01E03 American Buyout did a tidy little episode on the downsides of The Blackstone Group.
https://www.mgmplus.com/series/the-ruling-class/watch/season...
I'm not anti-capitalist, but I am opposed to unregulated behemoths warping safeguards by the weight of their own capital and lobbying.
Where else do you send it to? Vanguard, with 7.7T AUM? For reference, Blackrock's AUM is 9.4T.
This is hard so I built a stock analysis platform for myself. But there are much better ways to get a diversified basket of solid stocks than blindly sending your money to the same 500 companies everyone else is sending their money to.
There isn’t a simple formulaic answer to the question of how society should most optimally invest it’s excess capital.
So then investing in an index fund should be a fine choice for some, even many, correct?
There are 2 top funds that invest in the same 500 companies. Many in the US who earns well is sending x% of their income to these funds without forethought. It's far too much mindless capital concentration.
Even without the index funds, the S&P 500 is used as a base reference in many investment contexts.
When everyone blindly accepts a truth in investing, it's worth keeping an careful eye on it to make sure it stays true.
Great, now investors have to choose between which index fund to pick. What makes you think the average investor is qualified to make that choice? By definition one of them will make above average returns, and the other below average returns, so half of investors will make below average returns and the other half will make above average returns. You can't have everyone making above average returns. Why not split the difference and invest in both of them (ie. buy the market), and get average returns without having to worry about which one to choose? That's basically what buying broad market index funds (eg. VTI or ITOT) does.
Money is a form of power, and blindly applying it in a spot just because everyone else is doing the same strikes me as not optimal.
Our saving grace is probably that the S&P500 is extraordinarily well-chosen. It's diversified across place, industry, and to some extent size. And it helps that America is an economic machine for the ages.
In the sense they "ought" to vote, or they should do it because it would result in better returns for them personally? I don't think the former is a good reason, because I don't think the average investor is going to do a better job at allocating capital than wall st analysts. The latter has empirically been proven false. Actively managed funds have collectively underperformed passively managed funds, and daytrading retail investors almost always lose money.
>Money is a form of power, and blindly applying it in a spot just because everyone else is doing the same strikes me as not optimal.
People investing money in passive funds aren't messing with the price discovery process. Since they buy everything in proportion to market cap, they're not picking winners or losers. As long as some active participants exist, price discovery will still happen. If their numbers drop critically low, the market might be more be less accurate or be more susceptible to manipulation, but we're not anywhere near that point yet. In contrast, encouraging "average investors" to pick stocks absolutely does mess up the price discovery process. The average person is dumb and spends way too much time chasing whatever they heard on news yesterday night. A horde of retail investors likely reduces the overall "intelligence" of the market (through idiotic trades) and likely results in losses for them (from more sophisticated investors taking advantage of their behavior).
> It's far too much mindless capital concentration.
Maybe it is. Maybe there is a systemic risk there. I have long thought this myself but cannot articulate the risk beyond "big money in small place". And I cannot rule out that there isn't a systemic risk and that the top 500 US companies are near-optimal allocators of capital. Therefore being the best place to send your money.
About the "mindless" bit. Index funds are mindless. That's their job. You put money in, it grows (or shrinks) with the market, all while keeping your guaranteed losses, aka management fees to an absolute minimum (I'm sure you know all this). Is that really a mindless choice? I do not to think so. I think of it like choosing Python over C when I just need to bang out a few calculations.
> When everyone blindly accepts a truth in investing, it's worth keeping an careful eye on it to make sure it stays true. I think what you see as everyone accepting a blind truth is really a large number of people making rational individual decisions. If its truly mindless dogma everyone is following, and you are not, then congratulations - you are well positioned to "win" the investing game.
I don't think it does. Sitting on this kind of capital is easy, sprinkle it in enough places during good times and you'll get good results. Add some contacts to that (like private phone calls with the FED) and it's even easier. Having capital is a shortcut to making things happen. What's difficult and takes work is bootstrapping without capital.
It's easy when you're talking about someone's 401k with half a million dollars in it. With one click you can put it in the S&P 500, a 60/40 split, a target date fund, or if you're young and frisky maybe you put it in a mix of crypto, renewable energy companies with an uncertain future, and some pre-trial drug companies, because you can afford to lose it all.
If you're BlackRock with $9T AUM and you know that it's other people's retirement money you're managing, it's a lot harder. That much capital moves markets. You can't go in and out of positions easily, because the very act of you buying or selling alters the price appreciably; that is, you're too big of a player to be an invisible participant in the market.
Hell, even a high net worth individual looking to place $50mm isn't going to have an "easy" job, once you realize that the name of the game is actually preserving the purchasing power of that capital. That takes work. It doesn't come for free.
> What's difficult and takes work is bootstrapping without capital.
This is also true. But if managing capital was that easy, nobody rich would ever not be rich anymore. The Vanderbilt family was at one point estimated to be worth more than 1% of the US GDP; yet by the fourth generation, they sold their famous mansion, The Breakers.
That's why most people with a lot of capital hire others to manage it.
Also, there are many cases where capital is just "left to sit" and still grows. If you get lucky enough, even dead people can grow their capital.
Capitalism might help if you want the strongest loggers to cut the most logs. But it doesn't help the smartest scientists do more science. Science just doesn't work that way. That's why we are transitioning from picies (age of mass production) to aquarius (age of resource mangement). Why will our children have to carry their own water?
The optimal strategy for them is to coerce all the companies that they invest in to only do business with each other in order to completely lock new competitors out of the market. This is very bad for consumers and society.
Please elaborate. What's the right amount?
Why does that matter? Why is 10T too much? It's a big number but that money is ultimately under the control of the individual asset holders (so far as I understand it anyways).
The only conceivable scenario where a major Canadian bank fails and any depositors are not made whole is one where the government has lost the ability to maintain the currency and the Canadian dollar is worthless anyway.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_banks_in_North...
The mutual fund would use the cash to buy stocks or loans and you would be entitled to a share of that profit or loss (both upside and downside), but the mutual fund manager would typically only be paid an annual fee (1).
Money deposited in a bank gives you no upside, and, as you say, a tiny downside risk. (even before deposit insurance) Those taking the downside risk (as well as the upside) is mainly bank equity investors.
(1) As another commenter correctly pointed out there are also other sort of funds that look a bit more like banks for various reasons, but that also doesn't necessarily mean the fund manager is the one taking the upside/downside risk.
Can you explain this part more? Does blackrock not invest its own money in deals? And are specific deals specific to blackrock customers or do they just take a percent of their overall holdings and invest them in individual deals?
What the exact flow is will depend ultimately on how the fund is structured. For example, Goldman will run a private equity focussed fund that you can put money in as a customer, so if you did put money in it, they would invest in similar deals on your behalf. Other customers of Goldman may or may not choose to invest in that fund, preferring something like a bond fund or equities fund etc.
It will take away a small percentage of your money every year to pay costs and make its profits, but you will profit from the returns of the investment itself.
1- https://www.pionline.com/money-management/blackrocks-aum-cli...
"The Fed Is Subsidizing the Money Market Funds Operated by Larry Fink’s BlackRock as BlackRock Manages a Big Part of Jerome Powell’s Wealth" [0]
[0] https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/10/the-fed-is-subsidizin...
The site you linked is doing a favorite exercise of conspiracy therorists; A is related to B which is related to C which is related to D. Therefore, A and D have conspired, despite in reality not having anything to do with each other.
"Fed Chair Powell Has Upwards of $11.6 Million Invested with BlackRock, the Firm that Will Manage a $750 Billion Corporate Bond Bailout Program for the Fed " [0]
[0] https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/05/fed-chair-powell-has-...
The fed choosing an asset management firm is similar to choosing a vendor. That in itself isn't a "conflict of interest". That only arises if there's reason to believe that the Fed or its officials are making decisions that benefit themselves personally at the expense of the fed. For instance, if they hold outsized positions in blackrock and chose them despite not being the best choice (eg. vanguard is is cheaper).
The upper tiers of power don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
For the chair to not have a conflict of interest, they'd need to forfeit all their money, or keep it in cash under their mattress.
It should be a crime to be a regulator while doing business with the entities one is regulating. As I said, just my opinion.
Following the Dallas/Boston Fed scandals a couple of years ago, the Fed does enforce this separation of interests, and Powell's money is now held in a blind trust. The trust is managed by Blackrock.
Even that would be a conflict! They are Federal Reserve Notes under that mattress, after all.
Kind of wild that one man* has the ability to change the dollar's purchasing power, which affects literally billions of people, isn't it?
*: Actually twelve members of the Federal Open Market Committee.
I'm just thinking out loud though, I'm just an armchair investor, for all I know these notes are paying 10%, although I doubt it.
Is the idea that if you're profitable before the note expires then you have the ability to buy the note back without losing equity?
If you do a convertible note, you have liquidation preferences and will get most of your money back in the high probability event that the company fails.
Don’t ever give your investors board seats. They are not your friends or advisors.
If the obligation involves repaying the note in cash along with interest, instead of settling it via shares plus a supplemental amount stemming from the interest, typically something has gone awry.
https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/about-us/investment-stew...
Are there kilofactories and megafactories? The rarely seen obscure myriafactories?
I thought gigafactory had no meaning other than Tesla's marketing speak for a large factory, but apparently the term is gaining traction for better or worse:
> The term "gigafactory" has also been adopted by other companies which are involved in the manufacture of electric vehicles and other clean tech products. Established automobile manufacturers such as Jaguar and Volkswagen now use the term to refer to their own electric vehicle factories.[6][7] Newer companies such as Stellantis have also embraced the term[8] by referring to four new "gigafactories" in France which will produce lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. Other companies such as Holosolis[9] and 3Sun,[10] which only produce solar cells and finished solar panel assemblies, also use the term "gigafactory" to refer to their facilities. The term is therefore understood to generically refer to large industrial facilities which are associated with the decarbonization and electrification trend.
Not sure about trademarks though.