Charles Gasparino: Larry Fink as Wall St. Dr. Evil?: “Woke” Within Reason

Strolling along Sixth Avenue the other day, I noticed something unsettling. No, not some homeless guy using a sidewalk as a bathroom. That’s one of the many nasty things I’ve become inured to amid our city’s precipitous decline. 

Rather, it was a vehicle billboard portraying a sinister-looking corporate executive dressed in a dark suit with a menacing look in his eye. It made me wonder whether this dude was about to assign a hit squad to come to my house. In the background of the exec’s likeness flashed an ominous question: “Who is Larry Fink?”

Unlike probably most New Yorkers, and definitely most Americans, I actually know who Larry Fink is: A longtime Wall Street veteran and now the CEO of the world’s largest money manager, BlackRock, an outfit he built from scratch by being a great investor and risk manager.

Stakeholder capitalism

Larry does wear suits, even dark ones on occasion; he also has a penchant for cardigans. When he strolls around BlackRock’s offices, his appearance often is closer to Mister Rogers than Doctor Evil.

He’s known for pushing for something called stakeholder capitalism (which I’ve criticized) — a squishy concept in which corporations look to better the human race as opposed to churning out profits for shareholders. And his embrace of some woke policies through the investment fad known as ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) standards. 

Yes, we have taken our shots at Larry, but these are things that don’t make him particularly evil by the standard definition of the word. 

In fact, some smart people think ESG might just make the planet cleaner. Stakeholder capitalism might just force CEOs to think twice before doing things that hurt the public.

That said, a group named Consumers’ Research, which is behind the Fink signage, is looking to cast him as someone my mother-in-law in Queens needs to worry about when she walks down the street.

So I did a little research on Consumers’ Research. It’s broadly described as a conservative nonprofit looking to expose wokeism in Corporate America, which isn’t a bad thing. 

What might be is the notion pushed by the group that Fink represents corporate wokeism on steroids.

According to the group’s Web site, among other woke sins, “Larry Fink Loves China.” Actually, I know Larry likes Chinese food. I also know BlackRock, like every financial firm, doesn’t exactly love China but has to do business on the mainland given the size of Chinese consumer market.

Fink also is a self-described (and dreaded) “globalist,” the group says. Yes, BlackRock does business across the globe, and Fink takes a global view of how to run his company. But then again so does just about every CEO of every major American company. 

Moreover, “Larry Fink exploited the 2008 recession to build BlackRock’s business.” Sounds scary — unless you know what really happened during the 2008 financial crisis. Since BlackRock is one of Wall Street’s best risk managers, the government thought it was a good idea to hire the firm as an adviser during the bank bailouts.

I was tempted to ignore the “Larry Fink is a root of all evil” meme because it’s so absurd. 

Then I realized Consumers’ Research’s Fink bashing was actually gaining some steam among some conservatives as Wall Street’s version of Elizabeth Warren or AOC.

Enemies on both sides

In reality, both hate his guts. The reason: Fink proudly calls himself a globalist but also a “capitalist” who thinks our traditional system of wealth creation may need some reforming but don’t throw it out for the nonsense espoused by AOC, like the Modern Monetary Theory.

This progressive utopian view of economics suggests the country can spend away on countless social-welfare programs simply by printing more money and ignoring deficits. Fink called MMT “garbage,” because, as he told Bloomberg TV, “deficits do matter.”

Warren’s distaste for Fink stems from the fact that for all of Larry’s ESG talk, BlackRock still invests in oil companies. Fink isn’t a staunch opponent of Big Oil. In fact, oil-company CEOs have recently turned to him for advice on how to navigate a reasonable response to climate-change issues without abandoning their business wholesale and immediately, as the left is currently demanding.

That reasonable response is laid out in Fink’s latest annual letter to CEOs, where he said, “Any plan that focuses solely on limiting supply and fails to address demand for hydrocarbons will drive up energy prices for those who can least afford it, resulting in greater polarization around climate change and eroding progress.”

Will Hild, Consumers’ Research executive director, doesn’t buy it. In a statement to me, he said Fink has “gone all in on China and the woke agenda and now that he is getting called out, he is backtracking and trying to sell himself as a moderate.”

And yes, BlackRock is a massive and powerful company — the largest money manager, with assets under management of $9 trillion, so it has enormous influence on corporate-governance issues. Investigating how it uses that power is a worthy cause.

But this column calls balls and strikes, and to my conservative friends, if you’re looking for Corporate America’s Doctor Evil, Fink doesn’t fit the bill.

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