Jim fink personal investing3/24/2023 ![]() In a prophetic 2019 interview at the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy’s eighth annual conference, Fink argued against divesting from oil and gas companies despite the push to do so from some ESG-focused investors and predicted what could happen to companies who lean into ESG initiatives too strongly. “We have to be working with energy companies, not against ,” he said, adding that any transition to clean energy will need to be “fair and just.” ![]() The CEO added that, unlike some critics have claimed, he has always been against forced divestiture from oil and gas companies as a part of ESG initiatives-and he isn’t anti-fossil fuel. “Unfortunately, there are some politicians who are taking parts of what I said out of context, but that’s the world we live in today.” “We are one of the largest, if not the largest, hydrocarbon investors in the world,” he said. He noted that Blackrock is a major natural gas pipeline financier and has some $171 billion of investments in public U.S. stands for “Satanic”-and claims that his company is anti-fossil fuel on Tuesday. But he said that in “long-term flows,” the company was “awarded over $400 billion.” Still, despite the inflows into its funds, BlackRock’s assets under management, which peaked at over $10 trillion near the end of 2021, fell to $8.59 trillion in December.įink also pushed back against anti-ESG statements-like Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s recent Tweet where he said “S” in E.S.G. “Whether stakeholder capitalism, or ESG standards, are being pushed by BlackRock for ideological reasons, or to develop social credit ratings, the effect is to avoid dealing with the messiness of democracy,” Patronis said in a statement announcing the move.įink admitted that BlackRock lost “about $4 billion of flows from various states” due to its ESG stance last year. And in December, Florida’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, chose to divest $2 billion of his state’s funds. Louisiana State Treasurer John Schroder divested nearly $800 million in taxpayer funds from BlackRock in October due to Fink’s ESG stance. Critics began to call it “ woke capitalism.” Then, last year, the situation was made worse when Fink’s annual letter to CEOs echoed his past statements about sustainability, and added a new note about “stakeholder capitalism”-a policy of serving not only shareholders, but also employees, customers, and the public. They’re trying to demonize issues.”įink was first linked with ESG investing back in 2020, when he warned that climate change was fundamentally reshaping finance in his annual letter to CEOs and argued that executives needed to “reallocate their capital into sustainable strategies.” The stance drew the ire of a coalition of over 75 conservative leaders and elected officials who signed a letter to the CEO asking him “reconsider” the announcement. “And for the first time in my professional career, attacks are now personal. “It’s hard-because it’s not business anymore, they’re doing it in a personal way,” he told Bloomberg.
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