Scary: Larry Fink would Be Hillary's Treasury Secy: Advocates Privatizing Soc Security
Larry Fink and His BlackRock Team Poised to Take Over Hillary Clinton’s Treasury DepartmentBlackRock is far from a household name, but it is the largest asset management firm in the world, controlling $4.6 trillion in investor funds — about a trillion dollars more than the annual federal budget, and five times the assets of Goldman Sachs.
And Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, has assembled a veritable shadow government full of former Treasury Department officials at his company.
Fink has made clear his desire to become Treasury Secretary someday. ......his dream (to be) in a future Clinton administration.
And his priorities appear to be so in sync with Clinton’s that it’s not entirely clear who shares whose agenda.
Clinton, for her part, has refused to rule out a Treasury Secretary drawn from Wall Street.
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Kendrick Wilson, a vice chairman at BlackRock since 2010 who has ties to Goldman Sachs, Lazard, and the Treasury Department. He advised Treasury while it managed the financial crisis and its fallout in 2008 and 2009, before coming to BlackRock. At Treasury, Wilson brought his experience advising financial institutions to carry out hastily arranged crisis-era deals, like the merger of Bank of America and failed subprime lender Countrywide.
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It’s worth considering how Fink’s recent experiences might inform his approach at Treasury. Asset management firms invest pools of money into securities on behalf of their clients, which in BlackRock’s case include 94 of the Fortune 100. They don’t issue securities themselves; they just buy stuff.
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But they are embedded in the broader financial system as voracious buyers of securities. For example, BlackRock holds major share amounts in nearly every mega-bank, takes funds from scores of Wall Street investors, and manages a majority of the federal government’s bailout programs. They may not create the risk, but they own a lot of it. Fink, who co-created the mortgage-backed security while a trader at First Boston in the 1980s, is a longtime respected figure on Wall Street; Geithner reportedly used him as a conduit between Treasury and the financial industry.
He also knows how to work the levers of power to achieve his ends.
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But Fink and BlackRock pushed hard to successfully resist the designation of asset managers as systemically important financial institutions (or SIFIs), which would be subject to additional regulation like larger capital requirements.
Fink also opposes efforts to reinstitute the Glass-Steagall firewall between investment and commercial banks, as does Clinton.
In fact, Fink’s views on Wall Street are so similar to Clinton’s that it’s hard to see that as a coincidence. Most notably, Clinton’s financial reform plan is mute when it comes to regulating asset management firms as SIFIs.
Fink has in recent months stressed an end to “short-termism” in the financial markets. For example, he wants to limit share buybacks that pump up stock prices, and encourage investors to hold stock longer, to focus on long-term corporate performance. Clinton has mirrored this language to such a degree that the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin suggested that Clinton “could have been channeling Laurence D. Fink.”
While the call to end short-termism is in some ways laudable, in Fink’s case it certainly reflects his self-interest. Clinton’s tax plan, for example, would keep capital gains rates higher for short-term holdings and decrease the rate for investors who hold assets over five years. Because BlackRock buys and holds most of its investments, any policy favoring long-term strategies in the markets would improve the firm’s bottom line.
Victor Fleischer, a leading tax lawyer and professor at the University of San Diego, questioned Clinton’s embrace of the short-termism argument in the New York Times earlier this month, saying it would “do little to address top-end income inequality,” since plenty of wealthy people buy and hold.
And Fleischer explicitly worries that the short-termism idea originated from Fink. “I find it hard to shake the feeling that at the end of the day, in a Clinton administration, it would be Larry Fink, not the technocrats, calling the shots,” Fleischer wrote.
Fink has also promoted the privatization of Social Security, while mocking the idea of retiring at 65, which is easy for a business executive who sits at a desk all day to say, rather than working on an assembly line or as a waiter.
Fink owes his initial backing at BlackRock to Pete Peterson, the former commerce secretary who has been at the forefront of the campaign to cut or privatize Social Security. He sat on the steering committee of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a stalking horse for Peterson’s ideas.
https://theintercept.com/2016/03/02/larry-fink-and-his-blackrock-team-poised-to-take-over-hillary-clintons-treasury-department/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Yes, looking down their noses at Sanders' supporters is really all they have...
....because there can be no discussion about issues... or fathoming the conflicts of interest.
I'm sure we might get an "LOL 
" soon. That always wins the argument for them.
i read Larry Flint
Completely agreed.
and that's all you've got. 
I asked for evidence, not hysterical opining.
outed yourself as that. "You people" 
facts. That's really all we ask. 
And I promise to do the same. 
Since you butted rudely into a comment merely to make a gratuitous snark, buh-bye! 
website so I can track the performance.
PS. She's been caught lying abundantly even just through this election cycle but because it's on her website that means it's true?
I've been paying attention to her and Bill even before I became a member here in DU in 2005.
I don't trust a thing she says.
Good luck with the election! I hope your pick makes it.
and are continuing to repeat it - Faux Noise style. 
Hillary, anything goes.
Kill the messenger and ignore historical facts and current facts.
Bill was clearly breaking the law yesterday, but we need to ream Bernie Sanders supporters.
This needs to be kept kicked up! 
.... ought NOT to be a Wall Street executive?
Those were the days, eh?
===============
and Hillary wants to continue his plans.....
She CANNOT be Trusted
because a lot of these oligarchs were sitting in that room having there bagel and cheese for a fee, on what she was and what her agenda is all about-----------------------that's pretty simple........................
You can run but you can't hide, and she does have a lot of connections to this firm--------------------that is a fact
https://theintercept.com/2015/10/21/clinton-takes-her-advisers-side-attacking-big-banks-but-not-blackrock/
http://freebeacon.com/politics/hillary-clinton-goes-back-to-well-hits-up-financial-industry-for-fundraisers/
Honk-----------------for a political revolution Bernie 2016
