금융 분야에서 블랙록의 힘과 영향력

### 블랙록의 힘: 자산 관리와 경제에 미치는 영향에 대한 이해
* 🏢 블랙록의 본사 앞에 서면 **미국 GDP의 절반이 넘는 10조 6천억 달러**를 관리하고 있다는 사실에 놀라움을 금치 못합니다.
* 🤖 래리 핑크가 이끄는 블랙록은 **포춘 500대 기업의 95%에 대한 투자를 감독**하는 등 많은 국가보다 더 큰 부를 관리하는 '로봇'으로 묘사되기도 합니다.
* 📈 소극적인 투자자라고 주장하지만, 그들의 영향력은 **일상적인 경제적 상호작용에 스며들어 시장을 형성하는 데 있어 진정한 역할**에 대한 의문을 제기합니다.
* 💰 보편적 소유권이라는 개념을 통해 블랙록과 유사한 회사들은 **거의 모든 상장 기업에서 보통 3%에서 10% 정도의 상당한 지분**을 보유할 수 있으며, 이는 **기업의 의사 결정에 상당한 영향력**을 행사할 수 있습니다.
* 📊 수익의 대부분은 투자 수익이 아닌 **수수료에서 발생**하기 때문에 더 많은 고객을 유치하고 더 큰 규모의 자금을 관리하도록 인센티브를 제공합니다.
* 📉 이 모델은 자산 관리자가 직원 복지보다 주주 이익을 우선시하기 때문에 **임금 정체와 소비자 비용 상승**에 기여해 왔습니다.
* 🔄 블랙록의 광범위한 로비 활동과 정부 관리들과의 인맥을 통해 **엄격한 규제를 피할 수 있는 등 정치와 비즈니스가 서로 얽혀 있는 것**은 분명합니다.
* 🏛 궁극적으로 블랙록은 모든 것을 소유하지는 않지만 **상당한 통제력**을 행사하며 일반 시민에게 이익이 되지 않는 방식으로 경제를 형성하고 있어 **보다 공평한 금융 시스템의 필요성**을 강조합니다.

블랙록의 영향력은 경제를 형성하여 부유층에게 혜택을 주는 반면 일반인들은 재정적 결정에서 목소리를 낼 수 없게 만듭니다.

I'm standing in front of the headquarters of a company that manages $10.6 trillion. That's more than half the United States GDP. Last time I covered the shady consulting group McKinsey, and you guys asked for one thing: Blackrock. So here we are. Blackrock is the subject of a lot of speculation online. There is a robot that controls more wealth than any country on Earth. Really, the commander in chief is Larry Fink. They have stock in 95% of Fortune 500 companies. And they've been hired by governments across the world to help manage financial crises and even just conduct normal operations. That means that pretty much any time you interact with the economy—working, buying stuff, driving a car, going to the bank, anything—you're interacting with Blackrock. But that $10.6 trillion isn't really their money. Don't worry. We'll come back to that. And they claim they're just passive investors, which seems harmless, right?

While I love a good conspiracy, and I know there was a cornucopia on the fruit of the loom logo. How much of a conspiracy is this really? I wanted to get to the truth behind Blackrock and the other nearly identical asset managers, State Street, and Vanguard, known as the Big Three. Are they actively controlling the world and shaping it in their favor? Or are they passive investors just riding the wave of American economic expansion? Stay with me. We'll get to the spooky stuff soon. But first, let's talk through some finance basics that give Blackrock their power. What an asset manager actually does, the main product they provide, index funds, their favorite loophole, passivity, and their position in our economy. The not at all terrifying sounding universal ownership. Blackrock is an asset manager, and the service they offer is taking a customer's money and making more money out of it. Their existence relies upon an important invention of the 70s.

This waterbed's only $119! More exciting. The index fund. It was pioneered by the first CEO of Vanguard, and it offers investors a way to invest in many stocks at once. So instead of betting a lot on a few individual companies, you bet a little bit on every company in the whole index. Basically just the whole market itself. The index at least steers a steady course. It's like instead of betting on a single horse, you're betting on all the horses at once. And index funds are a form of mutual fund. The more general way people pool their money together to make big investments. But someone needs to be the one to pool all that money together and manage it. And that's an asset manager, i.e. Blackrock. Index funds and ETFs are their main products, and they're pretty similar. They're popular because they're lower risk, have more consistent returns, and are cheaper for asset managers because they don't

have to pay a guy to place bets all day, which studies show they are not very good at. Just ignore the folly of short-term speculation. It's absolutely a loser's game. So if the market is up 7% today, so is your index fund. Instead of constantly buying and selling shares, which is what active investors do, Blackrock and these big asset managers buy a little bit of every company and just hold onto those shares basically indefinitely. This is called passive investing, a title that affords them a lot of legal leeway they otherwise wouldn't get. They own so much that it would be impossible for them to sell out of any one stock in one fell swoop. When you think about passive- we can't sell a company as long as they're in the index. Most of the money asset managers manage comes from institutional investors. Those are big pension funds, insurance companies, non-profits, and university endowments.

But while all the money they manage is in the hands of these big institutions, most of it actually comes from regular people. Public and private pension plans, 401 K owners, college tuition, and anyone with insurance. This is your money, but it doesn't always come back to you, nor do you get a say in the companies it gets invested in. While they want good returns on those investments, contrary to how we think about Wolf of Wall Street type investors, that's not actually their main goal. They make their profits from the fees they charge to their clients, not from the returns on the money they invest. I spoke with Benjamin Braun, a professor of political economy at the London School of Economics. He's written a bunch of studies on asset managers' role in our economy and society. The fees you earn if you're Blackrock increase when the market value of the assets you manage increases. You maximize your assets under management by winning over new clients.

and by getting the clients that you already have to you more money. When you have $10 trillion, you have to put them somewhere, and eventually that somewhere becomes everywhere. Universal ownership refers to holding shares in the entire universe, firms listed on the stock market. The big three asset managers Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street hold a sizable but still relatively small stake in all listed corporations. Blackrock is a 3 to 10% shareholder in all of these companies. This may not sound like a lot, but it's enough that selling all of it at once would likely crash that entire stock, kind of locking them into the whole not selling passive thing. 5% in any individual company is actually very significant because if and when shareholder ship is dispersed, 5% makes you in all likelihood the single largest shareholder in that company. That's why, for example, a lot of academic studies, 5% is taken as a threshold for control.

there's almost no difference between Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, and even a bunch of other asset managers in terms of their business model. So then you can start and wonder, okay, so if the big three together hold 25% of the shares in any individual company, then you're definitely above the threshold. Let's zoom in on Amazon. The big three owns 16% of all outstanding Amazon shares. Jeff Bezos only owns 9%. In theory, universal owners should have an interest in maximizing profits in the long term across the entire economy. And that is not how they operate in practice. The amount of stock you have determines the number of votes you get. Blackrock is almost always in the top three, maybe five if they're feeling broke. So that is a lot of votes. And let's not forget, it's not BlackRock's money that's invested. It's your dad's pension fund and your insurer's massive pile of savings.

It sounds crazy, but when you put your money in a pension fund, you sign away your voting rights to the pension fund manager. And then when the pension fund manager puts all their pension funds under an asset manager's control, they sign away all those votes to the asset manager, kind of pyramid scheme vibes. And how do they actually use those votes? A 2017 study found that asset managers almost always voted with what the company executives recommended. And why are they always voting with company management? Back in the 80s, company managers used to spend company money on company things like corporate jets, fancy offices, or occasionally paying their employees. And this made the investors sad because they wanted those profits. So they started offering company managers, in addition to bonuses and benefits, stock options. Executives' total pay was now forever tied to how much the company made. They can push managers, corporate managers to act more in the interest of shareholders, meaning in the interest

of corporate profits and do more to maximize corporate profits. This funnels money back to investors, who now include management and away from any hope of making companies work better, or including employees in the profits that their labor created. Back in the day, like my grandparents' day, more regular people had stocks, and the idea was that every shareholder could vote on things like board elections, mergers and acquisitions, executive compensation, and once in a while, wages. Sort of like democracy for people with disposable income. Government is the people's business, and every man, woman, and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid. In 1945, 94% of stocks were owned by households. But that's not really how it works anymore. Today, households have more like 40% of the stock market, and about half of that belongs to the top 10%. Okay. Thank you all very much. Thank you.

Thank you. Today, the top 1% own 50% of corporate equity and mutual fund shares, while the top 10% own 86%. Did you think this yellow part was everyone else? Nope. The tiny green part on the bottom is the least wealthy half of Americans. You often hear this argument that, What is good for shareholders is good for everyone, because especially in the US, where retirement assets are overwhelmingly invested in corporate equities, everyone is a shareholder. But that's simply not true. The bottom 50% virtually owns no shares at all; the vast majority of shares are held by the top 10%. And within that, even shareholdings are quite concentrated within the top 1%. And while the strategies corporations choose - because asset managers vote for them - affect everyone, they only benefit half the population even a little bit, and frequently hurt the other half, those without any shares at all. Take the example of worker pay.

Blackrock and other asset managers play a huge part in wage stagnation. If you're a corporation, you can increase profits only in so many ways. And you can always, in a short term, increase returns to shareholders by squeezing workers. So, this kind of Uber monopolization really hurts working people, consumers, and even small businesses. And this is where it gets interesting. There's evidence that this type of universal ownership is in part responsible for why everything is so expensive these days. For example, they have significant stakes in Nike, Adidas, Lululemon, and Under Armour. If one outperforms the other, it's the same from BlackRock's point of view, and sometimes it can even lose investors' money altogether. If companies were to start lowering prices to compete, that's the universal ownership logic in action, but it's also an anti-competitive logic in action. The fact that all five airlines, all the major banks,

for example, in the US, have the same large shareholders creates a danger and a risk that these corporations will not engage in competition in the same way they would if they each had different shareholders because, in that world, each shareholder would root for their company and would hope to outperform the market by the company waged a bet on. It's sort of like a neo-monopoly where companies don't even have to merge and buy each other anymore because they all send profits to the same guys no matter what. And their large stakes in basically every company afford them friends in high places. From just 2014 to 2015, Blackrock performed over 1,500 private engagements with the companies held in their portfolio. Blackrock reportedly believes that meetings behind closed doors can go further than votes against management, and they typically give management a year before voting against them. They also have a lot of friends in the government.

There's a sort of revolving door between Blackrock, the government, and the international bodies that create monetary policy. Things like the US Treasury, Federal Reserve, the central banks of Canada, some European countries and Sweden, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum. Since 2004, Blackrock has hired at least 84 former government officials, regulators, and central bankers worldwide. The intersection of politics and business has never been more ongoing. Larry Fink himself is on the board of the WEF and even tried to get himself selected as Hillary Clinton's treasury secretary in 2016. And in 2008, they got themselves a pretty sweet deal. Traders say this is the craziest day they have ever seen in these markets. Veteran traders say they’ve never seen anything like it. In the aftermath, the government created the Financial Stability Oversight Council to oversee entities like Blackrock that control a lot of money.

but aren't banks. The FSOC pointed to Blackrock as an organization that's so big that its failure could cause another collapse and tried to put additional oversight on them. But Blackrock doubled their political lobbying spending, including running a super-targeted ad campaign on the DC Metro, and managed to dodge the oversight that other large financial institutions receive. And let's come back to that loophole they like to call passivity. The people who decide if they're passive enough to continue not to be overseen by the government are Blackrock themselves. Basically, Blackrock and other asset managers have to submit annual letters to self-certify that they've been compliant with the terms of passive investment. That's like being allowed to write whatever you want on your taxes and then audit yourself. Except if you also had $10 trillion, which, unless you're watching this and you're literally Larry Fink- hey, bestie- I'm going to safely assume you don't.

The part that really blows my mind is that while this one company already has their eggs in basically every basket and is making money off seemingly everyone, it goes even deeper than that. The biggest investors in Blackrock are Vanguard and State Street. And the biggest investors in Vanguard are Blackrock and State Street. And the biggest investors in State Street are, you guessed it, Blackrock and Vanguard. Asset managers are the shareholders of asset managers. And this is true for all financial firms and not only, in fact, for stock market listed firms but private equity firms buying up private insurers. So the financial sector effectively owns itself. The biggest companies that they own own them back, creating this loop that sucks money in and never seems to spit it back out. They play all sides of the game because at a certain point, you can't lose when you play against yourself. So going back to our original questions: does Blackrock own everything? No.

but do they control everything? Kinda. They profit off of every bit of your life while controlling just the minimum amount they need to make sure they can continue profiting off of every bit of your life, and they get paid by teachers' retirement funds to do it. And they get away with this by constantly exchanging money for power and utilizing legal loopholes. It's worth being pedantic here for a second. They don't own everything. They own shares in everything, which gives them an outsized amount of control. So while they're not necessarily the ones making all the nitty-gritty decisions in every company, it is their influence, and this giant structure of universal ownership that continues to make their pie bigger and ours smaller. It's the ultimate endgame of the Investor Management Alliance. Remember the part about how they're responsible for reporting their own passivity to the government? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the FDIC are working to change that.

and make it so that asset managers that own large chunks of banks like Blackrock are regulated like banks. The asset managers, of course, are not happy, and they are lobbying against this. So, regulating them much further is going to prove difficult. And this is a solution to one part of a much larger problem. We no longer have the old system of shareholder democracy. We have something more like a shareholder oligarchy, where the people with the most power over where our money and stuff goes are incentivized to make that stuff worse and more expensive and not work for us. But Blackrock didn't create this system; they just used it to their advantage. And I think we deserve a better one where the people who create the wealth have a say in where it goes. Thanks for watching the Class Room—where controlling the world is important to us. Send us your next favorite conspiracy.

BlackRock: The Conspiracies You Don’t Know

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글로벌 자산 관리 분야에서 블랙록의 독보적 우위

블랙록은 미국 GDP의 절반 이상인 10조 6천억 달러를 관리하고 있으며, 포춘 500대 기업의 95%에 상당한 지분을 보유하고 있습니다.

이 회사는 패시브 투자자를 자처하지만 경제의 다양한 측면에서 그 영향력이 느껴집니다.

블랙록은 스테이트 스트리트, 뱅가드와 함께 '빅 3' 자산 운용사로 꼽히며, 인덱스 펀드와 ETF를 통해 고객의 자금을 모아 대규모 투자를 관리합니다.

블랙록과 같은 자산 운용사는 모든 회사의 주식을 조금씩 사서 무기한 보유하는 패시브 투자 방식을 사용합니다.

대부분의 자금은 기관 투자자로부터 조달하지만 궁극적으로는 일반인의 자금이 투자됩니다.

빅3 자산운용사는 모든 상장 기업의 지분을 적지 않지만 상당수 보유하고 있으며, 5%만 보유해도 최대 주주가 될 수 있습니다.

뱅가드, 블랙록, 스테이트 스트리트 등 3대 자산운용사는 아마존의 16%를 포함해 주요 기업의 주식을 상당 부분 보유하고 있습니다.

이러한 집중된 권한으로 인해 이들은 상당한 의결권을 행사할 수 있으며, 종종 회사 경영진과 의견을 일치시키기도 합니다.

주식 소유의 중심이 가계에서 자산 관리자로 이동함에 따라 개인 주주의 영향력은 감소하고 상위 10%가 주식 시장의 상당 부분을 소유하게 되었습니다.

기업 소유권에 부와 권력이 집중되는 현상

미국인 상위 1%가 기업 주식과 뮤추얼 펀드 주식의 50%를 소유하고 있는 반면, 상위 10%는 86%를 보유하고 있으며, 하위 50%는 사실상 주식이 없습니다.

블랙록과 같은 소수의 자산운용사에 대한 이러한 소유권 집중은 임금 정체와 반경쟁적 관행에 기여하여 근로자와 소비자에게 부정적인 영향을 미칩니다.

보편적 소유 모델은 동일한 대주주를 가진 기업들이 효과적으로 경쟁하지 않는 신독점 효과를 낳고, 이는 가격 상승과 진정한 시장 경쟁의 부재로 이어집니다.

블랙록은 2004년 이후 84명의 전직 공무원을 고용하는 등 정부 및 국제 통화 기구와 회전문 채용을 하고 있습니다.

이 회사는 정치 로비를 통해 감독을 피할 수 있었고, 소극적 투자에 대한 자체 인증 프로세스는 의문을 불러일으켰습니다.

블랙록, 뱅가드, 스테이트 스트리트 간의 소유권이 서로 맞물리면서 금융 부문 내 권력과 부를 공고히 하는 고리가 형성되고 있습니다.

블랙록과 같은 자산 운용사는 보편적인 소유권을 통해 이익을 얻고 다양한 회사의 주식을 통해 상당한 영향력을 행사합니다.

이들은 영향력에 대한 비판을 받고 있으며 정부의 잠재적 규제에 직면해 있지만 이에 맞서 로비를 벌이고 있습니다.

현재의 시스템은 주주 민주주의에서 과두제로 바뀌었고, 권력을 가진 사람들은 다수의 상황을 악화시키도록 인센티브를 받고 있습니다.