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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

It's all the people you'd expect, some purpose-built REITs, big investment firms and private equity, Blackrock, Blackstone and other wealth management, the larger investment banks and the commercial mortgage paper owners are also directly invested (double dipping just like we saw in 2008, where banks would buy mortgages and also leverage those mortgages with derivatives)

Many of them are some of the companies that wax lyrical about remote work being bad and are often featured in articles. Submarine PR is absolutely rampant alongside "native advertising".

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It's so crazy to me how 2008 was barely a decade-and-a-half ago, and people already forgot how much of a coordinated, organized, and pseudo-fraudulent shitshow the CDO merry-go-round was. Loans were given out, rating agencies were being bought, and everyone was skimming off the top until the music stopped. Are we really pretending it can't happen again?

Do you have any evidence to back these claims up? (genuinely curious)

You can look at who owns what in their portfolios, none of this is especially private information. They publish it all online. I literally just googled "who owns the most commercial real estate" and "commercial real estate bond ownership amounts" and things like that. It's not subtle, companies tout their ownership percentages and REITs list their investors.

I meant evidence of them campaigning, or financing/instigating campaigns, against remote work, thereby influencing decisions of companies to implement "back to work" policies.

ETA: I agree that you did not say this was happening in your original comment, but it seems to me your comment implied that these companies were actually influencing major decisions (since that's the topic of the OP).

https://nypost.com/2022/09/07/blackrocks-larry-fink-vows-har...

Blackrock is a major institutional investor in just about every company, so they have press and backchannel effects. I assume similar things happen with e.g. vanguard and big ibanks. I know Jamie Dimon has been railing about RTO for a while.

Thanks, though I'll note that that article is about Blackrock encouraging/forcing its own workers to do hybrid work, not arguing that other companies should do so.

It's more than that, if you read the part below the fold they talk about "if we get more people back into offices the Fed's job will be easier", which I assume goes to a more systemic argument anyway. Cheers!

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