This month's issue of Vanity Fair has an article on Larry Fink, the CEO of the money management firm Blackrock (which I had never heard of before reading this article) and how their management of $12 trillion in taxpayer cash makes them the single biggest yet also most shadowy financial entity in the country:
Though few Americans know his name, Larry Fink may be the most powerful man in the post-bailout economy. His giant BlackRock money-management firm controls or monitors more than $12 trillion worldwide — including the balance sheets of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the toxic A.I.G. and Bear Stearns assets taken over by the U.S. government last year. Full Article
A bit later in the article, the company is described as the "Blackwater" of the financial world:
BlackRock’'s enormous and growing influence and its sheer size — too big to fail, some say — has begun to raise questions. "It’s like the Blackwater of finance, almost a shadow government," says one senior bank executive . . . Full Article
Probably the most interesting part of the article, at least to me, is buried about 3/4 of the way through where VF describes the vast and extremely sophisticated computer system that Blackrock is using to monitor the financial markets:
If the software can sift through $1.2 trillion in mortgage securities and provide "daily risk assessment reports" it can just as easily be tuned to sift through the phone calls, emails, and financial transactions of states, cities, neighborhoods, friend networks, even down to individual citizens and provide "risk assessment reports" on them as well. It could be used to monitor who might become a "terrorist" in the conventional sense of the word but more importantly who might be on the path to pulling their money out of the markets or downsizing their lifestyle.
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