This is exactly why Larry Fink makes these statements: to singal the correct virtues and keep himself out of trouble. This is the modus operandi for most people who possess unfairly oversized influence today.
BlackRock helped to play one of the instrument, but there are many instruments in the game of finance.
See it this way:
In the old world, people produces actual product to get rich, the landlord, the factory owners etc. It worked out fine overall so the world accepted this game mode as an option, in addition to the old lord/emperor mode.
Then, some smart gamblers discovered that they can gamble on promises and expectations to get rich too, and it worked out good overall so the world again accepted it as a new game mode as an option too.
The wealth divide always exists, and historically can largely/only be destroyed by time and/or large scale disasters. But in the new gambler game mode, most people ain't in it (as in "It's a big club and you ain't in it" from George Carlin) and don't have the power to play it. It's a system don't reward honor, loyalty or labor. That's why most people are left out while the riches steams far ahead (then jets far ahead, then rockets far ahead, you get the idea).
> Says the man who actually widens the wealth divide.
Which doesn't make him wrong about the AI boom being a huge risk in making the wealth divide (already beyond gilded age levels) much worse.
Of course, because he is who he is the only solution he talks about is getting people to "invest in stocks", which, yeah that makes a ton of sense if you already have wealth since the current ruling class have shown that they will not, under any circumstances, let number go down even if none of the economics make sense (sure, they'll orchestrate a little dip here and there so they can profit massively off the insider information, but hey crime is legal bro).
But it does nothing for the many people who are really going to get squeezed here who are already living paycheck to paycheck and watching the water rise up to about their necks at this point.
Isn't this why this statement should be taken seriously?
But your statement implies the opposite, which is to ignore Larry Fink's warning. That appears irrational.
This is a man who's dedicated his life to enriching passive investors. The people building AI are working hard to push the frontiers of science and technology. They deserve to get rich. Because they're creating new wealth for all of us. Yet for some reason Larry Fink views this as a problem. That tells you all you need to know. His loyalty is to the idle ruling class that's so incompetent they need him to manage their wealth. Blackrock is a business that charges people a fee to take control of their shareholder voting rights basically, which is a power he's abused for years. Financial people don't build anything. Yet somehow the system gives him the authority to dictate decisions for the people who do. That system needs to change.
> Because they're creating new wealth for all of us
Let's not give them too much credit here. They are aiming to capture the vast majority of that wealth for themselves, the rest of us are going to be fucked
If you believe in AI hype (which you seem to) you should acknowledge the passive investors are the ones funding the massive data center buildouts, infrastructure investment, and paying for R&D that has not yet proven profitable.
This may make you sad, but the system exists to allocate capital to projects like this. And without large financial institutions and concentrated wealth, none of that would happen.
This is an overly charitable take on the role of AI companies.
A more realistic view would be that they shamelessly plundered the work of millions of people, used it to destroy the livelihood of the original creators, while making a profit for themselves out of this collective nightmare.
I don't know why I'm the only person online willing to steelman this, but...
The early Internet users weren't people who subscribed to AOL to look at porn in the 90's. They were the people who were granted access to the ARPANET to work in the 80's. The Internet was an exclusive community back then. You had government employees, knowledge workers, and elite university students who had all passed institutional screening processes. You were only allowed to use the ARPANET if you were using it to do something useful and aligned. Therefore you could feel reasonably assured that anyone you talked to online was going to be better than the average person you'd find going outside and walking down the street. If you wanted to know who they were, you could just finger their username. If you wanted to know who owned a domain, you could whois it, get their name and then even write them mail or call them.
People have wanted that old Internet back for a long time. i.e. the one that existed before Eternal September. Those are the people who run your tech companies. The ones who remember what it was like. These people understand what people actually want isn't always the same thing as what they say they want. They understand why the only truly successful Internet spaces on the modern Internet are the ones like Facebook that got people to be non-anonymous. Another example is the best places to work that folks desperately want to get into are the companies like Google whose intranets are much more like the old Internet. These are really the only Internet spaces that normal people want to use. Because people want to interact with other people who are similar to them. Because people want to know who other people are. Otherwise we can't operate as the social creatures that evolution designed us to be. I don't think any civilization in history has operated its public square as a gigantic red light district where everyone is required to wear a mask. So why should we?
Overcoming the anonymous religion problem that somehow glommed onto the hacker and cyberpunk movements is more important and urgent now than it's ever been, because the Internet has been filling up with billions of AI agents. It's gonna be Eternal September in overdrive. Humanity is really facing a tradeoff where you'll have to have gatekeeping again and won't be allowed to conceal who you are, or you can be gaslit by machines forever in your own robot fantasy.
Even at $100 oil is the cheapest it's ever been historically. OPEC nations don't measure inflation in terms of U.S. CPI. They use gold as their benchmark. In 1969 a barrel of oil was worth $400 in today's money. What's incredible is even with the recent price rally, you can still buy oil at $71/barrel if you're willing to wait a few years to get your oil, due to the extreme backwardation of oil futures. That's an 82% discount over the historical norm. Also in real terms oil was worth about $500/barrel in the 2000s.
It would be more helpful to say don't buy options once the trade is obvious. As soon as something has hit the FOMO phase and IV skyrockets and all strikes cost the same, that's a sign you're too late and might want to bet against your thesis or use a different instrument. The financial shoggoths do a reasonably good job ensuring there's no free money. However they're obligated to trade regardless of conditions and sometimes that's their weakness.
DB's fall has been glorious. I shorted them back in January when I learned they were delivering 1.3% of their market cap in gold to the COMEX. No bank gives up that much of a hard asset unless something is wrong. Things are also looking bleak for Scotia Capital, BofA, Barclays, and UBS. JPMorgan seems to be doing fine. However Citigroup appears to be making out like a bandit. https://www.cmegroup.com/delivery_reports/MetalsIssuesAndSto...
What do their gold deliveries have anything to do with their financial situation? That'll just be settling GC contracts, and there will be clients on the other side.
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