BlackRock Conquered the World – The Corbett Report | Hacker News Reader

BlackRock Conquered the World – The Corbett Report

corbettreport.com

17 pointsjanandonly11 comments

Looking at the beginning of the transcript, where they point out all these corporations owned by BlackRock, it's funny that the Vanguard Group owns a bigger share of each one of them.

Indeed, why doesn't Vanguard or State Street Corporation control the world? I think there's a lot of little things that hurts the credibility of his overall story. The usage of "scamdemic" is another one - which if you dig into what he means by it, his reasoning is no better than that junk RFK is pumping out. There's even a dig at Bill Gates over the pandemic!

It's a great read, but best viewed through the lens of "All models are wrong; some are useful".

Why do people keep parroting these misunderstandings.

BlackRock, Vanguard, etc. are majority institutional holders because they are the brokerage houses / custodians that allow people to buy index funds/etfs through them.

It’s not that these companies themselves own the shares of all the companies in the world. They don’t.

And no, being custodians of index fund/etf that may have some kind of majority ownership in a company does not make BlackRock more influential of that company because they can’t decide to one day drop a company from the index because that’s not how indexes work.

FML

This is a very naïve view of Asset management companies work.

They have tremendous influence:

1- Blackrock has 170 ETFs with 8.5 Trillion USD.

2- When you buy a ETF, you own the ETF, BlackRock owns the underlying Shares.

3- They exercise voting rights, through their BlackRock Investment Stewardship, based on their own internal policies.

4- They provide limited proxy voting to eligible institutional investors, which is a tiny percentage of their actual clients, representing 12% of their holdings. The rest is completely under their control.

5- They define the ETFs, which means they get to choose how to invest, their clients get to choose which ETF to buy.

6- ETFs are usually defined very loosely, with a lot of maneuvering. Even "iShares S&P" definition is "seeks to replicate the performance of S&P 500". This means they don't have to replicate the holdings, just "try" to mirror performance. In practice this means that the top 10 holdings across all different S&P ETFs are similar, but the long tail has a lot of maneuvering and differences. As long as they provide a similar* performance.

7- They are the pushers of ESG, which means there specific ETFs whose portfolio is driven by ESG scores, and their voting decisions across all the assets they hold across all ETFs are shaped by ESG policies.

8- ESG scores is how they "launder" their influence, and they actively campaign and try to shape public discourse around this. They claim to be doing ESG, but in practice they do what they want. A clear example:

https://www.investmentofficer.lu/sites/default/files/2022-12...

BlackRock and Larry Fink taught me that my balding is not what is keeping me from being financially successful and I can confidently ignore all advertisement telling me otherwise.

Have you looked into dutasteride? Don't wanna rock the boat if you've made peace with it and enjoy avoiding the tyranny of bi-yearly haircuts but there's options out there, friend (if thats meaningful to you)

I seems dutasteride is given to treat some other health issues that become more common in my age. Thanks friend, I will take a look.

Ya, its arguably even more effective and sometimes tolerable than finasteride (propecia) which is technically the gold standard but dutasteride is the hidden gold in my view potentially.

Thats actually why it can be easier to have it prescribed if the hair angle isn't enough for your Dr. Lots of guys have enlarged prostates at that point or difficulties urinating that can be leveraged into a legit medical rationale, although I find it irritating we need to play these games at all.

Didn't Jeff Bezos teach you that already?

Actually, I never really though of Jeff Bezos als balding, just as a rich guy who shaves his had to look a little bit badass.

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