By Iain Withers
LONDON (REUTERS) – Blackrock Chief Executive Larry Fink has told investors that “Protectionism has returned with violence”, just a few days before a new rates from US President Donald Trump will be unleashed on the world economy.
In his annual letter to shareholders in the world’s largest asset manager, Fink wrote that too many people are currently missing prosperity in twin speed economies, where the rich build up more wealth and others are confronted with deeper hardships.
“Capitalism worked – only for too few people,” Fink wrote in his letter published on Monday, helping the gap to feed an increase in protectionist policy, while Trump did not mention any in a letter on about 10,000 words.
Trump has promised to reveal a huge tariff plan on Wednesday that he has dubbed ‘Liberation Day’. He has already imposed rates on aluminum, steel and cars, together with raised rates for all goods from China.
Fink said that almost every customer, leader and person with whom he spoke, was more anxious about the economy than “every moment in recent memory”, but he said that markets had a tendency to perform in the long term.
The most important argument of the BlackRock boss to solve these problems was to promote the markets of “democratization”, partly by helping a larger number of consumers gain access to potentially higher efficiency on private markets such as infrastructure and private credit – investment areas in which BlackRock has extensively extended.
BlackRock, which became the world’s largest money manager, thanked mainly for the popularity of cheap passive index tracking funds, last year on a buying in the worldwide infrastructure partners, private credit provider HPS and private data agency Preqin.
Private assets are, unlike listed shares and bonds, usually not mentioned, are traded less often and their prices can be opaque, which increases potential risks for retail investors.
(Reporting by Iain Withers; adaptation by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes and Chizu Nomiyama)
