the terrifying content of the article makes counter-intuitive to assign a little heart showing our appreciation for it. Trump was right, addressing the opposing interests of Main Street vs Wall Street.
Yes, but it misrepresent’s whose assets BlackRock actually manages. The reason BlackRock gets to vote all these shares is because the BlackRock mostly manages passive investors (ie middle and upper middle class) who have their money in funds - Pension plans, 401(K) plans, mutual funds, and ETF’s.
I am the tax director of a family services office. My husband works in the investing industry. The consultants I work with consult with hundreds of family services offices averaging over $1 billion per family. While nearly all have some minimal amount in BlackRock and other managers, the vast majority of the AUM at BlackRock is from the middle class, who aren’t qualified investors in private equity, and can’t afford or don’t put effort into finding an advisor who directly invests in individual stocks and bonds.
This matters because if people don’t like what BlackRock is doing, or any other money manager, they need to go look at their retirement, pension, and/ or investment account statements. Go to the BlackRock website - it ain’t targeting the ultra-wealthy.
These fund managers are destroying the middle class with their own money!!! They are failing to meet their fiduciary duty to the middle class but most have no clue it’s their retirement assets, not some mythical super wealthy persons, that BlackRock is using to vote shares on “behalf” of the passive investor.
It’s long past time for class action lawsuits. ESG is nothing but a marketing campaign and it’s a scam that has cost tens of millions of Americans a lot of money. Most just don’t know it.
Public and private pensions, mind you: teachers, police, other government employees plus the dangerously underfunded multi employer plans covering construction workers. None of these people realize this.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I keep saying--nothing's gonna change until people get ready to look at fundamentally change their retirement plans. But it sounds better coming form someone in the biz!
The regular run of the mill person has no clue as to what to do about it. They hear stock market and their eyes glaze over or they panic. It’s been marketed to us as a monster that we can not defeat nor understand. It’s like a foreign language and most people don’t have the time to figure it out for themselves and no one is offering to explain it to them either.
I get that. There are fundamentals which do drive prices over time, particularly for established companies. You buy the products everyday. Earnings per share and dividends being huge ones. You use products everyday..... most of them have stock ticker symbols.
You can also look you investment statements. If you see a BlackRock fund, call the number on the statement and say “I don’t want a BlackRock fund, I don’t want funds with managers who are also promoting ESG funds.”
Unfortunately most of the S&P ETF’s, with or without some ridiculous subjective “ESG” attached to it, are run by the woke investment firms (that means they get to vote your shares). There is an ETF, ACVETF, that avoids wokest of companies, but it’s kind of expensive (cheaper than a lot of mutual funds, and avoids the tax consequences of mutual funds, but at 0.75% a little on the expensive side for an ETF).
If you don’t know what your doing, and you can’t find an advisor willing to help (a lot are just sales people anymore, they don’t know), then find an ETF you could feel comfortable with.
If it’s a pension plan you can email requesting a new manager and consents ideology is being placed ahead of profits. If it’s a 401(k) you can request less ideologically driven managers as options in the funds. If it’s your money, you should be able to find an advisor.......... it may take a few calls, and be on the lookout for bs artists, but it’s your money. The fear is there, but you’ll feel better not having your own money used against you.
Goldman Sachs used to be called government Sachs, now the Blackrock bolsheviks rule the roost. Amazing that Biden portrays himself as Main Street when all of Wall Street is in his corner.
It is safe to say that everyone who allows their resources to be utilized by BR, and its conjoined (Siamese) twin Van guard, are at least indirectly culpable in this takeover. The sad part is said "wise" investors probably think they are smart, ahead of the curve. But it could be their Deadman's Curve.
Absolutely. My husband works for one of the big wire houses. Of the 40+ licensed advisors in his office, he is one of only 4 to directly invest his clients’ money into individual stocks and bonds, and he is the ONLY one under 55. It’s a dying skill. Too many think they aren’t in these funds, but they are actually in firm models (an internal money manager invests but the statement looks like direct investment). The big wire houses today want to less risk and everybody on cookbook portfolios, and a minority of advisors tells management to pound sand. Unfortunately the small firms are worse.
The best way to tell? Call your advisor and pick 3 random stock positions to sell out of completely (ones with the fewest built in gains ideally), and only those 3, and see what the response is.
My husband has clients call all the time and say things like “I don’t want to be invested in Apple, they use slave labor, can you sell all my apple shares?” His response, because he is the actual money manager “sure, no problem. Before I hit sell, so you know for tax purposes, xxx is you short term gain, and xxx is your long term gain. Here is how I think we should reallocate the funds when the trade settles. Are you good with that?”
If you start getting baloney reasons, you are probably on a firm model.
It’s an industry use of the term for the big broker/dealers with advisors who manage investments for they clients (very different from funds, do-it-yourself, or call center ones even though these firms have those options for small investors). Once upon a time it meant something specific about connection to WS, but I’d need to ask to remember what the differentiating tech was.
Examples are the brokerage arms of Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Wells Fargo.
Thank you for some of the most clear writing on the ESG shakedown that I can find. It's clearly a mafia pretend score that is subjectively applied to companies that Blackrock needs to move upwards.
So while most corporations pay fealty to ESG to get passing grades that will allow pension funds to hold your stock, chosen tickers can be given A+++ ESG scores for having a "LGBTQ+ ONLY" parking spot in the side lot in order to triple their market cap for Blackrock holders.
Ethically the idea of anti-woke stock funds are neat... but they don't work in this environment. I'm currently in search of 'corporations' that do nothing and produce nothing but have AMAZING ESG scores. Those are the tickers to watch.
Go figure. The DNC has become the party of chaos by design. Look at our foreign policy and the clowns in charge. Blinkin, Winkin and Nod. Diplomacy no longer exists. Why no attempt to stop the Ukraine war? Because they want and need it. The great reset is not fiction, it is a playbook. Cheap energy is done. Debt is the false god of the illiberal governments around the world but they have printed themselves into a corner. Sometimes even the WEF can't control timing. Watch for the coming black swan that starts WWIII with all the major powers in it together. Nice slogan. Americans that hope to survive had better pray, plan, prepare and RESIST.
100%. Woke crony capitalism. Free market capitalism works. Any form of crony capitalism not so much, but woke is especially deranged and destructive. The free market part of our economy has been regulated and reallocated almost out of existence.
The Democrats’ entire platform is reallocating middle class tax dollars to Wall Street cronies.
Are the CEO’s of Halliburton and other arms producers really who you’d consider “poor” in need of taxpayer dollars to “make ends meet?” Was the hundreds of billions invested into the now-defunct Solyndra really meant to create “middle class jobs,” or was it meant to enrich Obama’s cronies? Is the “Inflation Reduction Act” going to do anything to encourage the creation of affordable clean energy, or is it just another re-allocation of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of corporate cronies?
Not only that, but the Democrats, at the behest of passive money managers like BlackRock and Fidelity, are constantly pushing for regulations that make it more difficult to turn your company 401(k) into a self directed or managed by a financial advisor who works for you IRA, even after retirement age. If people try to transfer their 401(k)s to a personal financial advisor/ broker today rather than leaving it at the institution your corporate executives chose for fund managers as an IRA, the advisor you chose personally is required by regulation to give you a form asserting you hiring your own financial advisor is the most expensive and lowest return option, regardless of material reality.
This new required “disclosure” has absolutely nothing to do with the actual fees the financial advisor you choose will actually charge, nor does it have anything to do with the actual return your broker has gotten historically for his or her other clients. Instead, it requires your chosen financial advisor to make you sign a form that assumes you will be charged 2% annually by your advisor (which is FAR higher than your advisor is likely charging you), and your returns will underperform if you move your money.
The same “disclosure” asserts, regardless of the actual situation, you will do best leaving your money in passive investments right where it is (usually Fidelity or BlackRock). Most outrageously, as a gift to the insurance lobby, it claims your second best option is an annuity, including variable annuities.
Most annuities, particularly variable annuities, come with UP FRONT fees of 5%-6%, annual fees of 1.5%-3%, and a lockup period. A couple years ago my father (a retired broker/ financial advisor) picked 25 of the largest variable annuities to analyze over a the last 10 year period - this was following a decade of very good market performance which should improve the performance of variable annuities. He found people would have had a better return in FDIC insured brokered CDs than all 25 of the annuities even though this was a period of low interest rates. They would have been much better investing in an S&P ETF. Variable annuities are as much of a scam as ESG - nothing but higher fees and marketing.
Democrats relentlessly pushed this new requirement that actual financial advisors, people who make their living working for their clients not the institutional investor side (funds), to have incoming clients sign a government required “transparency disclosure” that asserts outright fabricated return and fee projections meant to discourage the middle class from using a financial advisor who works for them as the client.
Why? They don’t want the middle class to manage their own wealth because they don’t want the middle class to utilize the power that comes with controlling their own wealth - from voting shares to choosing investments based on what is in the best interest of the middle class investors personally. Wall Street management often supports this approach because the banking side took control after 2008, and banks hate risk but love predictable revenue streams.
There was talk, then more and more talk, "Blackrock and Vanguard"....then, for a while "State Street", and there were three. Then up came a new body, but so briefly I can't even remember it's name, so brief was it's duration on my screen.
Then brutally, there was/is only Blackrock...and Blackrock uses the ESG strings to manipulate its followers. we know the name of the puppeteer, but who manoeuvres him?
Listen, does Trump have any chance of fixing this Jordan. Anything behind the scenes that is palpable. It seems the Supreme Court is standing firm on 2A for sure. Just spanked the states that put laws in place limiting this and that. But, is there something else. God, I hope Durham has this, and he's moving from the past to start with the current issues and the election. He can work back from there. It seems from a National Security Perspective, he really needs to start from this point and work back. Otherwise, Jordan, have the Country have no idea what is happening? The puppet must disappear from the picture so that Americans can figure out who is really in charge of this Country, which we all know is Obama. Any guidance on this.
exactly, your point is a notable omission of an otherwise excellent article.
it is a big miss. no meaningful & positive change can come to the federal gov until US citizens realize DNC & GOP leadership are on the same team aligned against you/us the individual tax serf. trump had a chance to wield the office of the presidency against the leviathan 'deep state' and CHOSE not. look at his key appointments. it is inexcusable and demonstrated terrible leadership/management skills. these mistakes occurred all the while the 'deep state' attacked him with the most baseless accusations from hillary's campaign which she and bill were more guilty of than trump (uranium 1 scandal, bill got paid $500k for an hour long speech & stayed at Putin's palace on the trip).
blackrock was a major player in the trump admin, like the obama admin which preceded him & the biden admin which followed. omitting this fact tells a half truth.
the terrifying content of the article makes counter-intuitive to assign a little heart showing our appreciation for it. Trump was right, addressing the opposing interests of Main Street vs Wall Street.
Yes, but it misrepresent’s whose assets BlackRock actually manages. The reason BlackRock gets to vote all these shares is because the BlackRock mostly manages passive investors (ie middle and upper middle class) who have their money in funds - Pension plans, 401(K) plans, mutual funds, and ETF’s.
I am the tax director of a family services office. My husband works in the investing industry. The consultants I work with consult with hundreds of family services offices averaging over $1 billion per family. While nearly all have some minimal amount in BlackRock and other managers, the vast majority of the AUM at BlackRock is from the middle class, who aren’t qualified investors in private equity, and can’t afford or don’t put effort into finding an advisor who directly invests in individual stocks and bonds.
This matters because if people don’t like what BlackRock is doing, or any other money manager, they need to go look at their retirement, pension, and/ or investment account statements. Go to the BlackRock website - it ain’t targeting the ultra-wealthy.
These fund managers are destroying the middle class with their own money!!! They are failing to meet their fiduciary duty to the middle class but most have no clue it’s their retirement assets, not some mythical super wealthy persons, that BlackRock is using to vote shares on “behalf” of the passive investor.
It’s long past time for class action lawsuits. ESG is nothing but a marketing campaign and it’s a scam that has cost tens of millions of Americans a lot of money. Most just don’t know it.
Public and private pensions, mind you: teachers, police, other government employees plus the dangerously underfunded multi employer plans covering construction workers. None of these people realize this.
100% correct.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I keep saying--nothing's gonna change until people get ready to look at fundamentally change their retirement plans. But it sounds better coming form someone in the biz!
The regular run of the mill person has no clue as to what to do about it. They hear stock market and their eyes glaze over or they panic. It’s been marketed to us as a monster that we can not defeat nor understand. It’s like a foreign language and most people don’t have the time to figure it out for themselves and no one is offering to explain it to them either.
That is why Jordan is worth his weight in gold!
Clearly and concisely he points out the intricacies so we can clearly understand.
Yes! That’s me.. have no freaking clue what any of this means and how to look at my retirement stuff!
I get that. There are fundamentals which do drive prices over time, particularly for established companies. You buy the products everyday. Earnings per share and dividends being huge ones. You use products everyday..... most of them have stock ticker symbols.
You can also look you investment statements. If you see a BlackRock fund, call the number on the statement and say “I don’t want a BlackRock fund, I don’t want funds with managers who are also promoting ESG funds.”
Unfortunately most of the S&P ETF’s, with or without some ridiculous subjective “ESG” attached to it, are run by the woke investment firms (that means they get to vote your shares). There is an ETF, ACVETF, that avoids wokest of companies, but it’s kind of expensive (cheaper than a lot of mutual funds, and avoids the tax consequences of mutual funds, but at 0.75% a little on the expensive side for an ETF).
If you don’t know what your doing, and you can’t find an advisor willing to help (a lot are just sales people anymore, they don’t know), then find an ETF you could feel comfortable with.
If it’s a pension plan you can email requesting a new manager and consents ideology is being placed ahead of profits. If it’s a 401(k) you can request less ideologically driven managers as options in the funds. If it’s your money, you should be able to find an advisor.......... it may take a few calls, and be on the lookout for bs artists, but it’s your money. The fear is there, but you’ll feel better not having your own money used against you.
Goldman Sachs used to be called government Sachs, now the Blackrock bolsheviks rule the roost. Amazing that Biden portrays himself as Main Street when all of Wall Street is in his corner.
It is safe to say that everyone who allows their resources to be utilized by BR, and its conjoined (Siamese) twin Van guard, are at least indirectly culpable in this takeover. The sad part is said "wise" investors probably think they are smart, ahead of the curve. But it could be their Deadman's Curve.
Absolutely. My husband works for one of the big wire houses. Of the 40+ licensed advisors in his office, he is one of only 4 to directly invest his clients’ money into individual stocks and bonds, and he is the ONLY one under 55. It’s a dying skill. Too many think they aren’t in these funds, but they are actually in firm models (an internal money manager invests but the statement looks like direct investment). The big wire houses today want to less risk and everybody on cookbook portfolios, and a minority of advisors tells management to pound sand. Unfortunately the small firms are worse.
The best way to tell? Call your advisor and pick 3 random stock positions to sell out of completely (ones with the fewest built in gains ideally), and only those 3, and see what the response is.
My husband has clients call all the time and say things like “I don’t want to be invested in Apple, they use slave labor, can you sell all my apple shares?” His response, because he is the actual money manager “sure, no problem. Before I hit sell, so you know for tax purposes, xxx is you short term gain, and xxx is your long term gain. Here is how I think we should reallocate the funds when the trade settles. Are you good with that?”
If you start getting baloney reasons, you are probably on a firm model.
Interesting- and helpful thnx
It’s an industry use of the term for the big broker/dealers with advisors who manage investments for they clients (very different from funds, do-it-yourself, or call center ones even though these firms have those options for small investors). Once upon a time it meant something specific about connection to WS, but I’d need to ask to remember what the differentiating tech was.
Examples are the brokerage arms of Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Wells Fargo.
Defunding this...a moral
Perogative...time to talk to our financial advisors.
And those are the people who run the show.
Most of these crooks are straight from the Ivy League- "the best and brightest."
and greediest.
Thank you for some of the most clear writing on the ESG shakedown that I can find. It's clearly a mafia pretend score that is subjectively applied to companies that Blackrock needs to move upwards.
So while most corporations pay fealty to ESG to get passing grades that will allow pension funds to hold your stock, chosen tickers can be given A+++ ESG scores for having a "LGBTQ+ ONLY" parking spot in the side lot in order to triple their market cap for Blackrock holders.
Ethically the idea of anti-woke stock funds are neat... but they don't work in this environment. I'm currently in search of 'corporations' that do nothing and produce nothing but have AMAZING ESG scores. Those are the tickers to watch.
Go figure. The DNC has become the party of chaos by design. Look at our foreign policy and the clowns in charge. Blinkin, Winkin and Nod. Diplomacy no longer exists. Why no attempt to stop the Ukraine war? Because they want and need it. The great reset is not fiction, it is a playbook. Cheap energy is done. Debt is the false god of the illiberal governments around the world but they have printed themselves into a corner. Sometimes even the WEF can't control timing. Watch for the coming black swan that starts WWIII with all the major powers in it together. Nice slogan. Americans that hope to survive had better pray, plan, prepare and RESIST.
When Capitalism turns to Communism.
Stakeholder Capitalism = Woke Capitalism
100%. Woke crony capitalism. Free market capitalism works. Any form of crony capitalism not so much, but woke is especially deranged and destructive. The free market part of our economy has been regulated and reallocated almost out of existence.
I thought Democrats hated Wall Street influence in the executive branch?
The Democrats’ entire platform is reallocating middle class tax dollars to Wall Street cronies.
Are the CEO’s of Halliburton and other arms producers really who you’d consider “poor” in need of taxpayer dollars to “make ends meet?” Was the hundreds of billions invested into the now-defunct Solyndra really meant to create “middle class jobs,” or was it meant to enrich Obama’s cronies? Is the “Inflation Reduction Act” going to do anything to encourage the creation of affordable clean energy, or is it just another re-allocation of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of corporate cronies?
Not only that, but the Democrats, at the behest of passive money managers like BlackRock and Fidelity, are constantly pushing for regulations that make it more difficult to turn your company 401(k) into a self directed or managed by a financial advisor who works for you IRA, even after retirement age. If people try to transfer their 401(k)s to a personal financial advisor/ broker today rather than leaving it at the institution your corporate executives chose for fund managers as an IRA, the advisor you chose personally is required by regulation to give you a form asserting you hiring your own financial advisor is the most expensive and lowest return option, regardless of material reality.
This new required “disclosure” has absolutely nothing to do with the actual fees the financial advisor you choose will actually charge, nor does it have anything to do with the actual return your broker has gotten historically for his or her other clients. Instead, it requires your chosen financial advisor to make you sign a form that assumes you will be charged 2% annually by your advisor (which is FAR higher than your advisor is likely charging you), and your returns will underperform if you move your money.
The same “disclosure” asserts, regardless of the actual situation, you will do best leaving your money in passive investments right where it is (usually Fidelity or BlackRock). Most outrageously, as a gift to the insurance lobby, it claims your second best option is an annuity, including variable annuities.
Most annuities, particularly variable annuities, come with UP FRONT fees of 5%-6%, annual fees of 1.5%-3%, and a lockup period. A couple years ago my father (a retired broker/ financial advisor) picked 25 of the largest variable annuities to analyze over a the last 10 year period - this was following a decade of very good market performance which should improve the performance of variable annuities. He found people would have had a better return in FDIC insured brokered CDs than all 25 of the annuities even though this was a period of low interest rates. They would have been much better investing in an S&P ETF. Variable annuities are as much of a scam as ESG - nothing but higher fees and marketing.
Democrats relentlessly pushed this new requirement that actual financial advisors, people who make their living working for their clients not the institutional investor side (funds), to have incoming clients sign a government required “transparency disclosure” that asserts outright fabricated return and fee projections meant to discourage the middle class from using a financial advisor who works for them as the client.
Why? They don’t want the middle class to manage their own wealth because they don’t want the middle class to utilize the power that comes with controlling their own wealth - from voting shares to choosing investments based on what is in the best interest of the middle class investors personally. Wall Street management often supports this approach because the banking side took control after 2008, and banks hate risk but love predictable revenue streams.
Traditional OG Democrats did. This new breed? Not so much...
Erik Van Nostrad. Isn’t that the Seinfeld character Kramer used to pretend to be 🤷♀️🤷♀️
There was talk, then more and more talk, "Blackrock and Vanguard"....then, for a while "State Street", and there were three. Then up came a new body, but so briefly I can't even remember it's name, so brief was it's duration on my screen.
Then brutally, there was/is only Blackrock...and Blackrock uses the ESG strings to manipulate its followers. we know the name of the puppeteer, but who manoeuvres him?
The WEF, modern day Bolshevik activists, and Twitter
When did Goldman Sachs pass them the baton?
Listen, does Trump have any chance of fixing this Jordan. Anything behind the scenes that is palpable. It seems the Supreme Court is standing firm on 2A for sure. Just spanked the states that put laws in place limiting this and that. But, is there something else. God, I hope Durham has this, and he's moving from the past to start with the current issues and the election. He can work back from there. It seems from a National Security Perspective, he really needs to start from this point and work back. Otherwise, Jordan, have the Country have no idea what is happening? The puppet must disappear from the picture so that Americans can figure out who is really in charge of this Country, which we all know is Obama. Any guidance on this.
exactly, your point is a notable omission of an otherwise excellent article.
it is a big miss. no meaningful & positive change can come to the federal gov until US citizens realize DNC & GOP leadership are on the same team aligned against you/us the individual tax serf. trump had a chance to wield the office of the presidency against the leviathan 'deep state' and CHOSE not. look at his key appointments. it is inexcusable and demonstrated terrible leadership/management skills. these mistakes occurred all the while the 'deep state' attacked him with the most baseless accusations from hillary's campaign which she and bill were more guilty of than trump (uranium 1 scandal, bill got paid $500k for an hour long speech & stayed at Putin's palace on the trip).
blackrock was a major player in the trump admin, like the obama admin which preceded him & the biden admin which followed. omitting this fact tells a half truth.