Personal Finance and Investing

and that is they are money MANAGERS and are PUBLICLY TRADED, as opposed to wealth funds or private equity funds. They manage money for investors, both individual and institutional and are by law, required to provide much more transparency than a Private Equity Fund does..

Sure, they have a shitload under management, but the investments they make and the shares they buy are held by various types of FUNDS and ETF's which in turn are held by individual investors as well as institutional investors like Pension Funds, Insurance Companies, etc. Way too much has been made of them of late, as if Black Rock is some giant boogyman looking to buy out and control the entire world. It's silly. Other people and institutions own what they buy, NOT Black Rock. Because of what they do they are heavily regulated and virtually everything they buy and sell is a matter of public record. You just have to be willing to slog though pages and pages of financial documents to find it out.

The concern should be focused on their buying power. They can use their leverage to sink or swim, if you'll allow me the reference, a given publicly traded company. They have the resources to purchase enormous blocks of shares and as a result, significantly affect the share price. But at the end of the day (literally at the end of the trading day), those shares are attached to various ETF's and Mutual Funds.

This concern is something that the SEC is charged with enforcing. But of course their teeth have been pulled by conservative influences in public policy, because god dammit, we just can't allow those pesky plebes like the average American to have a say, now can we?

But there is a way to reign them in.

VOTE.

BLUE.

NO.

MATTER.

WHO.