BlackRock

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BlackRock® is a premier provider of global investment management, risk management and advisory services to institutional and retail clients around the world. BlackRock, operates as an investment management firm in the United States.  As of 31 March 2009, BlackRock's assets under management total US$1.28 trillion across equity, fixed income, cash management, alternative investment and real estate strategies.

Through BlackRock Solutions® - the natural evolution of our long-standing investment in developing sophisticated and highly integrated systems - we offer risk management, strategic advisory and enterprise investment system services to a broad base of clients with portfolios totaling approximately US$7 trillion as of 31 March 2009.

BlackRock is a truly global enterprise. We serve clients in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Japan, Australia and the Middle East. Headquartered in New York, the firm maintains offices in 21 countries around the world. Over one-third of our total assets are managed on behalf of non-U.S. investors, and nearly one-third of our employees live and work outside of the United States. As of December 31, 2008, the Company had $1.307 trillion of assets under management (AUM).

BlackRock provides diversified investment management services to institutional clients and to individual investors through various investment vehicles. Its investment management services consist of the  cash management and equity client accounts; the management of a number of open-end and closed-end mutual fund families, active management of fixed income, and other non-United States equivalent retail products serving the institutional and retail markets, and the management of alternative funds developed to serve multiple customer needs. 

BlackRock also provides market risk management, financial markets advisory and enterprise investment system services to a broad base of clients.  The financial crisis has ravaged many a Wall Street giant, but it has also produced a handful of winners, with BlackRock, a money manager much admired but little known outside financial circles, fast emerging as one of the new powerhouses.

Over the last 14 months, BlackRock has won contracts to run major government rescue efforts involving the American International Group, Citigroup, and Bear Stearns.

In addition it won a bid to carry out a Federal Reserve program to stimulate the housing market and it has been hired to help evaluate Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

At the same time it has become a nearly constant adviser to a federal government struggling to manage one of the complex and largest financial bailouts in history.

While BlackRock advises the government and manages hundreds of billions in mortgage and other assets on behalf of taxpayers, it also sits atop $1.28 trillion in assets that it oversees for private clients like wealthy people, pension funds and foreign governments,.

Indeed, BlackRock has become so ubiquitious on Wall Street and in Washington that some federal auditors, watchdog groups and  lawmakers are questioning if the firm does too much.

While no one is accusing it of wrongdoing, critics are increasingly asking if enough is being done to avoid and monitor conflicts between its obligations to private investors and to taxpayers.

"They have access to information when the Federal Reserve will try to sell securities, and what price they will accept. And they have intricate financial relations with people across the globe," Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said. "The potential for a conflict of interest is great and it is just very difficult to police."

Laurence D. Fink, the firm's chairman and chief executive, says he is proud of the role his company is playing in helping pull the economy back from the brink, and bristles at the suggestion of impropriety. "What little hair I have left is rankled when people suggest that just because we are involved in many things, we are assumed to be guilty."

Since early 2008, when it was named to manage a $30 billion portfolio of Bear Stearns's mortgage assets-with no bidding and fees that were negotiated weeks later - BlackRock has gone on to win contracts to run major rescue efforts involving the American International Group, Freddie Mac, Citigroup and Fannie Mae. It also is carrying out some of the Federal Reserve's programs to unlock specific credit markets.

As Mr. Fink aides the government with maddeningly complex bailouts, he and other BlackRock executives nearly every week are able to bend the ear of Washington officials-in essence, to lobby-in favor of specific rescue policies.

At conferences and in responses to analysts, Mr. Fink has emphasized solutions that largely prop up the existing financial system, instead of shutting down or nationalizing banks, and more directly lifting housing markets by using federal funds to buy mortgage securities from investors and toxic assets from banks.

Deliberatly or not, those solutions also benefit BlackRock and its clients, in part by pushing up demand for mortgage bonds held in the firm's fund portfolios. Any resulting increase in the value of those funds, and the new money that that attracts from investors, translate into higher fees and fatter profits for BlackRock.

Mr. Fink has not been shy in boasting about his access. "I mean it is a great seal of approval," Mr. Fink told Wall Street analysts in December, as he simultaneously educated the Bush administration and the incoming Obama team. "We are asked to help navigate new policy. I'm running out of here to go meet with Treasury to talk about plans later this afternoon."

While not a household name, BlackRock is widely regarded as one of the best-run Wall Street firms. For Democrats, the firm's employees have been a reliable source of campaign contributions over the years.

Founded as a New York bond investment management firm in a one-room office in 1988, BlackRock today has 5,300 employees in offices around the world. In 2008, a disastrous year for Wall Street overall, BlackRock showed $786 million in profit on $5 billion in revenue. <

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