BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world, holding nearly $7.8 trillion in assets as of October 2020. Its model is based on the management and investment of money from pension funds, insurance companies and small savers. A document sent to the Financial Markets Authority (AMF) announces that the group now also holds 5.27% of the capital of Orpea, thus representing one of the main shareholders of the Ehpad company accused of mistreatment on its boarders. Little known to the general public, this investment fund is deliberately opaque about its activities. Between dubious funding and assumed lobbying, diving into the bowels of the monster.

Unlimited finance coupled with artificial intelligence

Since the subprime crisis of 2008, taxpayers’ money should no longer be used to save banks and hedge funds. Governments have thus put in place strong regulations on banking establishments. However, as BlackRock does not grant loans, since it invests the money of its customers, the group is much less controlled. A margin of maneuver which will not only have enabled it to take up the torch of banks like Goldman Sachs, but to make the capitalist model prosper without common measure.

Its activities have taken on considerable proportions, to the point of endangering the entire financial world if it were in difficulty; as has also recently been the case due to the Russian-Ukrainian situation, since the financial “octopus” is already showing losses of the first 17 billion on Russian assets. There is no doubt that a crisis could arise from the weakening of a manager as ubiquitous as BlackRock, holder of a virtual monopoly of 7,800 billion in assets, i.e. three times the gross domestic product of France just usa and china outperform it in terms of GDP !

Aladdin

Beyond its corporate philosophy which boils down to making the rich even richer, another problem arises and is called “Aladdin”.

This analysis program, developed in-house, is an artificial intelligence capable of performing risk management and making many financial decisions in complete autonomy. The latter handles 18,000 billion dollars daily or 80% of the annual GDP of the European Union! When it comes to making a profit, BlackRock is at the forefront of the least ethical maneuvers, as evidenced by the Arte documentary (2020): “Ces Financiers qui Dirigent le Monde”.

Climate change, an investment strategy

Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, presents himself, in the letters sent to his partners, as a visionary and a philanthropist, bearer of a modern form of capitalism…

The company is, however, a major shareholder in Rheinmetall, one of the largest manufacturers of military equipment in Europe. Based in Düsseldorf, the group sells weapons all over the world and its turnover is directly indexed to various civil wars. A search for profits under the cover of progress, favoring the most profitable investments. And the same goes for global warming.

On February 2, the latter, for example, alerted its clients to the need to adjust their portfolios to deal with the climate transition but, at the same time, BlackRock continues to occupy the role of Total’s leading investor. A paradox that is no exception.

From 2017, BlackRock also embarked on a process to integrate climate change into its investment strategies and declared on this occasion that “climate risk is an investment risk”.

In other words, while our ecosystem is undergoing record temperatures and we are experiencing the sixth mass extinction, BlackRock approaches the issue through the incompatible prism of financial consequences.

This greenwashing, deployed according to the deliberately biased conviction that “green growth” will save both the environment and financial interests, is increasingly arousing the indignation of ecological collectives and social struggle activists. On February 10, 2020, members of Youth for Climate, supported by several Yellow Vests and ecological organizations including Extinction Rebellion, organized a civil disobedience action in the offices of BlackRock.

“We must put out of harm’s way the biggest polluters on the planet” they declare to Reporterre; and BlackRock is no less than the source of youth, a multinational that finances, feeds, maintains, encourages and sustains climate groups, including a large part of the fossil fuel sector. As a reminder: fossil fuel pollution has killed 4 times more people than Covid-19.

To make matters worse, the group says their artificial intelligence software Aladdin is also designed to help investors track a portfolio’s trajectory to net zero, and better identify climate risks and opportunities.

A nice irony when you know that BlackRock owns 6% of Holcim, 9.2% of Glencore and holds stakes allowing it to control more reserves of oil, gas and thermal coal than any other investor (the equivalent of 9, 5 gigatons of CO2 emissions, or 30% of energy-related carbon emissions according to the NGO InfluenceMap). And in order not to cause harm to these companies, the group does not hesitate to lead a vast lobbying campaign against the sustainable finance of the European Union.

As Nantes Révolté reminds us, what the BlackRock affair reveals – and the trivialization of its financial mechanisms, which are nevertheless criminal , is above all the absence of the State in its role as a bulwark: “Whether it acts by coercion or by violence, the State is an institution that benefits from the capitalist ecocidal system, those in power are intimately linked to the big companies that derive the main benefits, and their victims are the same: the environment and the population”.

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