Free Republic

If a business wants to operate under “green” rules (or Marxist rules, or whatever sort), it is free to do so — and suffer the consequences. Investors may choose to put their money into such businesses if they want to take the risk. Or maybe the inventor prefers to put his money into an index fund that has announced its commitment to invest only in firms that have certain operating frameworks, such as minimizing carbon emissions. Again, no problem, as long as the investor knows ahead of time where the index fund will or will not put his money. But...

Last week, President-Elect Biden tapped two prominent individuals at the world’s largest money-management firm for key positions within the new administration’s economic team. Brian Deese, a BlackRock managing director who is responsible for overseeing the sustainable investment strategy of the firm, has been named as the new head of the National Economic Council. Wally Adeyemo, who served as a senior advisor at BlackRock and was Chief of Staff to CEO Larry Fink, has been nominated for U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Staffing is Policy as the DC saying goes, and such corporate picks might be a disappointment to some...

Want to make money and help the world, too? Wall Street says you can! If you invest in "socially responsible" funds, say big investment funds like BlackRock, Parnassus, TIAA-CREF, etc., then they'll do good things for the world, and your retirement funds will grow. These funds obsess about what they call Environmental, Social and Governance factors. For example, Parnassus says it picks investments based on "their environmental impact, how they treat their employees, the quality of their relationships with local communities." People believe. More than $100 billion poured in just in the first half of this year. But I won't...

On a late January afternoon, as press secretary Sean Spicer walked into the White House media briefing room, a tall, thin, bespectacled man poked his head in the doorway for a moment before turning around and heading back into the West Wing. Later that week, at another briefing, the man stayed longer, standing in the corner behind the podium, out of view of the array of television cameras. The reporters peppering Spicer with questions were unlikely to know it, but the wallflower watching over the proceedings happened to be the leading conservative intellectual to argue for the election of Donald...

Climate change poses two distinct risks for investors, and a special one for fund managers. The pledge last week by Larry Fink, CEO of fund giant BlackRock Inc., to push clients toward environmental, social and governance investing highlights another risk: that markets are shifting from harnessing the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of a handful of powerful money-management executives. Leave the pros and cons of ESG aside for a moment. Whatever you think of Mr. Fink’s view, his letter highlights the power he wields over the direction of corporate America, thanks to the votes of BlackRock’s extensive holdings. Shareholders...

Larry Fink’s recent letters to CEOs and investors were certain to press buttons, because they dealt with BlackRock’s plans to address climate change. Yet the reactions, Fink tells Barron’s, have been positive even as climate change has become a political football. “I received one of the great letters of my career from a client in a red state,” says the CEO of BlackRock (ticker: BLK). “This client was very thankful. This client said, ‘We have a 10- to 20-year investment horizon. We now need to look at how we think about investing.’ ” BlackRock puts climate-risk analysis at the heart...

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with more than $6.8 trillion under its control, becomes the latest signatory to Climate Action 100+, an influential big-money pact that’s pushing - although with spotty results so far - many of the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitters to take action on man-made climate change. BlackRock joins more than 370 global investors, including pension giant CalPERS and HSBC Global Asset Management, already participating in the initiative, which aims to sway companies ranging from fossil-fuel producers to consumer-product conglomerates to be carbon neutral by 2050. With BlackRock on board, total assets under management represented by Climate...

“The Democrats doth protest too much, methinks.” Hamlet. Act III, Scene II. 2019 adaptation. Nancy Pelosi’s dramatic tone was planned and well-rehearsed. “No one is above the law,” she said. The Speaker also said, “No one comes to Congress to impeach the President of the United States.” That was a blatant lie, but Pelosi was obfuscating, as usual. She held a vote to move forward on impeachment hearings without even reviewing the documents she was referencing as the reason to do so.It was weird. How can a Speaker of the House be so devoid of intellectual honesty? Wait. Never mind....

Remember when Hollywood low-life Harvey Weinstein was trying to payoff or shutup the girls decrying his sexual behavior..? Remember that BLACK CUBE, the IDF-affiliated, Blackwater-style private intel group was what Weinstein used to fakeBefriend and then spy on and harass the girls into silence..? HOW did the services of Black Cube come to Harvey Weinstein’s attention..? The freaking ex-Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, introduced them to Weinstein..! Can you believe this..? Barak, left And how did Ehud Barak know Weinstein? Via EPSTEIN..!! Yes, Ehud Barak was visiting Epstein’s NYC mansion and flying out to Rape Island. Isn’t this amazing?...

ALBANY — A millionaire walks into the State Capitol and says, “Raise my taxes.” Please. This was no joke: The millionaire was Morris Pearl, a former BlackRock executive who is the chairman of Patriotic Millionaires, a group dedicated to pushing for higher taxes on businesses and the ultrarich. Testifying on Tuesday at a state budget hearing, Mr. Pearl asked a bipartisan group of about half a dozen legislators to create a new “multimillionaire’s tax” on households earning more than $5 million a year in order to fund new affordable housing, infrastructure and schools. “I’m a person of some means. I...

Israeli agency told to find incriminating material on Obama diplomats who negotiated deal with Tehran Donald Trump promised the Israeli leader that Iran would never have nuclear weapons. Donald Trump promised the Israeli leader that Iran would never have nuclear weapons. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal. People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes,...

In the early days of the Trump administration, a memo of uncertain origin circulated at the highest levels of the White House laying out a conspiracy theory about "coordinated attacks" on President Trump's foreign policy agenda from a group of former Obama administration officials, according to a memo obtained by The New Yorker's Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow. The memo, which "reads like a U.S. military-intelligence officer's analysis of a foreign-insurgent network," they wrote, posited that "the communications infrastructure ... used to sell ObamaCare and the Iran Deal to the public ('Echo Chamber') has been shifted from the White House...

Meanwhile, Merz described himself as “upper middle class” yet he earns 1 million euros a year and has two private jets – not one. The rumor is Goldman Sachs is in its Crash & Burn mode for paying bribes and Blackrock will replace it as the most powerful financial institution in the world.

David Hogg, a 17-year-old high school senior and survivor of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, is now an outspoken gun law activist. He took to Twitter on Tuesday to encourage a boycott of BlackRock (BLK) and The Vanguard Group. _______________________________________________ #BoycottVanguard #BoycottBlackrock — David Hogg (@davidhogg111) April 17, 2018 _______________________________________________ BlackRock, Invesco (IVZ) and Vanguard are the top three institutional holders of American Outdoor Brands (AOBC), the parent company of Smith & Wesson Corp., one of the world’s largest gun manufacturers. BlackRock and Vanguard are also the largest holders of gunmaker Sturm Ruger (RGR). Many of...

Gun control proponent David Hogg is pushing a boycott of mutual fund companies invested in firearm manufacturer stocks. This follows his boycott of Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, which resulted in her initially losing advertisers and apologizing to him only to have her viewership jump 20 percent. Now Hogg is targeting BlackRock, Vanguard Group, and a few other mutual fund companies for holding gun manufacturers’ stock in their mutual funds. Hogg tweeted:

One of Parkland, Fla.'s most prominent student activists on stopping gun violence has called for a boycott of Vanguard and BlackRock, two of the world's biggest investors in gunmakers. In a post on Twitter on Tuesday, David Hogg remarked on the firms' ownership of gun maker stocks, adding "if you use them, feel free to let them know." Then he added two tags: BoycottVanguard BoycottBlackrock.

BlackRock's Gold ETF (IAU) has seen fund inflows every day in 2016 (no outflows at all) and with the stock trading above its NAV for most of the year, the world's largest asset manager has made a significant decision: •*BLACKROCK SAYS ISSUANCE OF GOLD TRUST SHARES SUSPENDED• *BLACKROCK SAYS SUSPENSION DUE TO DEMAND FOR GOLD ... It appears the huge demand for physical gold (and lack of supply) is finally catching up with the manipulation of paper prices. If this is anything other than a brief technical suspension, it could well unleash panic-buying as we already pointed out - there...

Markets have been going haywire.And according to Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, that has the potential to lead to layoffs through the first half of the year.BlackRock is the world's largest investor, with about $4.5 trillion under management.Fink said in an interview Friday morning with CNBC that the market volatility of late could affect CEO confidence and could lead to more layoffs.He said (emphasis ours):Having a market decline like this in the first couple of weeks of the year really, in my mind, puts a negativity across the economy. A negativity to every CEO who is looking at his or...

Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon details today how Cheryl Mills, one of Hillary Clinton’s longtime underlings, apparently collected a paycheck from New York University at the same time she was serving as Chief of Staff of the State Department. According to thearticle: After joining the State Department in the beginning of 2009, Mills continued to serve as general counsel for New York University for several months. She also sat on the board of the “NYU in Abu Dhabi Corporation,” the fundraising arm for the university’s UAE satellite campus. The school is bankrolled by the Abu Dhabi government...

It’s easy to dismiss Burning Man as nothing more than a bizarre hippie love-fest that takes place deep in the Nevada desert every year the week before Labor Day. But doing so misses the fact that it’s an amazingly successful enterprise--and, as such, has a thing or two to teach about how to inspire creative people and create a great product. Since it first began 25 years ago, Burning Man has grown larger every year (if you ignore the slight dip in recession-scarred 2009). It’s grown so much that this year, for the first time ever, the organization had to...