The Vanity Fair profile credits Fink as one of the first financial experts to develop the then-new market for trading mortgage-backed securities, a market that (according to the Vanity Fair profile) later “spiraled out of control” and would “bring the economy to its knees” as a major contributing factor in the 2008 housing market crash that led to the Great Recession. 7Ī 2010 Vanity Fair profile cited unnamed third-party estimates that Fink’s decade-long employment at First Boston increased the company’s bottom-line by approximately $1 billion.

After marrying, he went to work with First Boston in 1976 and began trading bonds. He majored in political science at UCLA before attending the university’s business school. Larry Fink was raised by an English professor mother and a shoe store owner father near Los Angeles, California. Protests included an online flyer claiming BlackRock was “the largest or second-largest shareholder in Big Oil giants” and “the biggest single investor in the 56 companies most responsible for building new coal plants in the developing world.” 6 Background A 2020 Wall Street Journal editorial was titled “Larry Fink’s Political Purgatory: The BlackRock CEO can’t seem to buy progressive absolution.” The Journal’s editors wrote that even as Fink had “promised to sell coal investments,” that offer didn’t spare BlackRock from multi-city protests by “climate ultras” meant to coincide with the firm’s annual meeting for shareholders. A 2019 report from the Fox Business Channel stated Fink had “ruffled feathers inside his company, as well as among some clients for embracing a number of progressive political causes and advocating what has been described as “corporate socialism” – a management concept that implores CEOs to run their companies in a way that doesn’t just benefit shareholders, but also “the communities in which they operate.”” One critic inside BlackRock told Fox Business that Fink had a fixation on “identity politics and virtue signaling that a CEO of a public company shouldn’t be engaged in.” Similarly, a corporate governance expert from the University of Delaware judged that BlackRock’s political agenda was “fundamentally not the role of a public company,” and that Fink’s behavior was “unfair to investors who may not agree with his politics.” 3 4 5įink’s commitment to left-leaning climate policy has also been criticized from the left. 2įink has made repeated public pronouncements regarding his intention to inject his left-of-center climate policy goals and an Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG) ideology into BlackRock’s investment and management strategies. 1 Fink is known for left-leaning politics, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presidency in 2016 and has been discussed several times as a possible Democratic administration Secretary of the U.S. Larry Fink is the co-founder, CEO, and Board Chairman of BlackRock, the world’s largest money management firm, where he has worked since 1988.

Charlie fink 2021