The Bleak Rack that is Black Rock, Edinburgh and Everywhere
Quietly did Black Rock grow in Edinburgh. Expanding behind the Brandon Street Victorian façade of Dundas House. £48m ‘refurbishment’. 1,500 jobs.
Making the UK home to 2 of the 5 biggest Black Rock offices in the world.
‘Our team combined the preservation of the Victorian frontage with the transformation of the wider building to provide modern facilities and sustainable systems that improve efficiency and reduce carbon impact,’ stated Elliot Robertson, chief executive of Robertson Group who did the refurbishment. As the Scotsman reports, ‘The design is said to have focused on “enhancing employee wellbeing”’
Wow, Black Rock tried to reduce their carbon impact! And focused on employee wellbeing!
Well that’s OK then.
How seamlessly and shamelessly have they stolen the narratives of a green and better future. Like the Victorian frontage, perfect camouflage of Edinburgh respectability. Nothing to see here.
Black Rock is not a bank. It’s an ‘asset manager’. It looks after other people’s money (invests in stuff), it takes care of things. Not exactly like the mafia ‘takes care of things’ not with open violence.
But yes, with violence.
Black Rock bought Israeli bonds directly to finance the genocide in Gaza. As Francesca Albanese details, there would be no genocide in Gaza without Black Rock’s loyal investments in weapons and facilitators of genocide.
‘Black Rock is the world’s first $12 trillion asset manager’ declared Dow Jones last July. Only China and the USA have an annual GDP exceeding Black Rock’s assets.
But ‘Aladdin’, Black Rock’s algorithmic decision maker, is much bigger.
If we ask google ‘why black rock became so rich’ the AI answer lists Aladdin first:
Aladdin is the algorithmic platform Black Rock uses for itself, but also leases to the other two biggest ‘asset managers’ – Vanguard and State Street, and to at least 200 other major financial institutions that include banks like Barclays and JP Morgan.
As Medium summarised on Inside Aladdin: BlackRock’s Secret Trading Engine in July last year: ‘Aladdin provides institutions with one clean, trustworthy lens through which to view everything. That means — consciously or not — BlackRock is helping to shape the way risk is modelled and measured throughout the entire financial system.
In a world of increasingly mechanised markets, Aladdin is the engine. And currently, Black rock owns that engine’
Google any catastrophe from destruction of the Amazon, the climate crisis, genocide in Palestine or Sudan, Plastics, Pesticides, Big Tech etc, then find out the big companies behind them and then search ‘who funds X,Y,Z company’.
The names that pop up time and again are Black Rock, Vanguard, State Street.
These are the super investors with controlling stakes in the world’s biggest corporations.
Let’s look at climate. The mega-shareholders driving expansion behind the Dirty Dozen (the world’s largest share-owned oil and gas companies) are a relatively small number of ‘keystone investors’ who encourage the ongoing expansion of oil and gas production.
This report shows that those super-investors are driving a trend in ownership concentration that is accelerating the climate breakdown. ………… Whilst fossil fuel assets are in their hands, the world will not be safe.’ As Reclaim Finance puts it : Through its voting practices ‘Blackrock unconditionally approves the fossil fuel expansion plans of these companies and disregards that they are not aligned with climate science.’
These results fit with a broader study of the Big 3 ownership of the S&P500 companies in the US.
All three – Black Rock, Vanguard, State Street – the biggest asset managers of capitalism on this planet – use the Aladdin Platform.
It squats quietly behind its Victorian facade, feeding us narratives of well-being and sustainability but all the while Black Rock is itself naught but an algorithm lurking in the incomprehensible codes of profit, pain and destruction.
How will all this end?
Not with a bang. Not with a whimper.
At worst, with stealthy asset managers and their ilk, gathering capital to their chests, gripping ever tighter the Aladdin algorithms that crush our soils, souls, waters, minds, minerals, climate, plants, health, life, love, humanity
At best, with the clarity of actual human brains, we collectively escape the bleak rack Black Rock and others have constructed and exist not for their profit, but human to human for all our equally precious lives on this exquisite tiny miracle of a home spinning alone in space.