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By Jo Nova
Finally, a strike at the heart of the Blob
Texas and 10 other US States have pressed the radioactive Antitrust legal button and filed against BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. The states claim the money managers bought up large stakes in coal companies and then colluded to promote ESG and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) goals that reduced coal output. The decreased supply of coal, in turn increased the cost of electricity to consumers. It was fundamentally anti-competitive behaviour. These three companies together have $26 Trillion dollars of assets under management. That’s only one trillion smaller than the entire US GDP.
In this case, some of the collusion hidden in clear view. The three money managers said they were trying to save the world and to protect the people, and they joined groups like the GFANZ and Net Zero alliances like Climate Action 100+. But in the end, these three financial giants had collectively acquired close to 30% of most US Coal companies, and even though they claimed to have good intentions, the 11 State Attorney Generals argue that any extraneous claims of social benefits are irrelevant. These three companies have profited immensely […]
By Jo Nova
JP Morgan, BlackRock drop out of climate banker cabal, and admit the Net Zero transition is “delayed”
In February three of the four largest financial houses in the world, left the giant financial cabal called“Climate 100+” (the fourth one left a year ago). BlackRock, JP Morgan and State Street all parted ways with the billionaire-club of philanthropists trying to bully the world into buying their own renewables. In the two months since then, two of their CEO’s have put out “letters to shareholders” predicting how the transition is going to be slower and harder and how we still need fossil fuels.
Suddenly everyone sounds like an energy skeptic.
There are lots of reasons for this shift:
1: US Republican States are pointing the “AntiTrust” gun at the billionaire banker club because it looks exactly like a monopolistic cabal doing its best to collude to reduce competition. The States are also firing up the fiduciary duty canon. Hence the bankers not only want to back away from the cabal, they want to sound like bankers that care about investing their clients funds.
2. The renewables bubble is deflating fast, and the CEO’s can […]
by Jo Nova
When will the Green climate activists realize they are the minions of the Banksters, and communist governments?
In 2021 BlackRock used its shareholder influence to force Exxon to drop some gas fields under the guise of “climate activism”. BlackRock were the second largest shareholder with 6.6% of Exxon at the time. They bragged about getting three new activist board members elected to help Exxon in the “energy transition”. But they also happened to be major investors in PetroChina too with 7% of the Chinese oil and gas company and BlackRock didn’t seem to care too much about their ESG policy. Conveniently, PetroChina was “poised” to buy many of the fields that the giant US oil company was getting its arm twisted to sell.
Naturally the Stupid-Media wrote this up as a win for koalas and whales or something:
It’s like sabotage of national assets
While BlackRock pretend to care about the environment, they were potentially undermining a US company, their US shareholders, and own pension fund clients, all to get a better deal, perhaps, with “favours” of who-knows-what for a foreign company, which is a subsidiary of the Chinese State CNPC. We can only speculate, […]
By Jo Nova
Unguarded Big-Money works like acid against democracy
Just like everywhere in the West, the money Australian’s earn may be quietly used against them to push policies they don’t want. The Australian Retirement Trust (ART) and HESTA are using their voting rights on corporate boards to push for climate action and gender diversity. They aren’t polling their members to find out if this is what they want. They are just following The BlackRock and GFANZ banker cartel modus operandi. It is coercion, done with the illusion of “good intentions”, but in reality, aggressively self-serving behaviour. The management of HESTA and ART couldn’t care less what the owners of the money want.
ART is a $260 billion fund (Australia’s second largest) with 2.2 million members. HESTA is a $76 billion fund with nearly 1 million members who are mostly working in health and community service. Just as with the US Funds, there surely is a question of fiduciary duty. Are these funds maximizing the return for investors or are they using their money to achieve political ends that result in lower income for retirees? Environmental investors lost 22% last year when energy investors made 54%.
So for directors […]
By Jo Nova
James O’Keefe formerly the soul of Project Veritas is back — he’s set up O’Keefe Media Group (OMG News). One of his insiders filmed Serge Valay, A recruiter at BlackRock, bragging about how they work.
“It’s not who the President is, it’s who controlling the wallet of the President.” “Who’s that?” she asks. “The Hedge Funds, BlackRock, the banks. These guys run the world.”
..you take a big f– ton of money and then you can start to buy people. Obviously we have this system in place. First, there’s the senators. These guys are f***ing cheap. You got ten grand? You can buy a senator.
BlackRock don’t want people to notice them:
“BlackRock don’t want to be in the news. They don’t want people to talk about them. They don’t want to be anywhere on the radar.”
“Why not?” she asks.
“I don’t know … I suspect because it’s easier to do things when people aren’t thinking about it.”
What kind of things are easier to do in the dark? Things other people won’t like.
News – he says, is propaganda. If you hear […]
By Jo Nova
Nearly every proposal from the climate activists was struck down:
How times have changed. After the energy crisis of 2022 investors at major oil and gas firms are spurning climate activism. A year ago nearly a third of investors at Chevron and Exxon voted for the draconian “Scope 3” emissions targets. These targets are ludicrous — requiring the oil and gas giants to adopt a plan to reduce third party use of their own products. It’s like a form of corporate sabotage.
This year only about 10% of the same investors voted for these measures. And apparently there’s a similar trend on the other side of the Atlantic with BP and Shell investors rejecting activism too.
This is a very encouraging sign that the dominance of BlackRock et al is waning — they are bullying the world with other people’s money, and word is spreading as the US states fight back.
ESG Blowback: Investors Reject Climate Measures at Exxon, Chevron
By Collin Eaton and Jenny Strasburg, The Wall Street Journal
The votes were abysmal for climate activists. All but two of the 20 shareholder proposals for the two companies garnered less than 25% […]
By Jo Nova
By forcing people to put money into pension funds in a form of investment that they weren’t necessarily comfortable with, governments created vast piles of money that was essentially left unguarded on the beach in a bay with a hundred pirate ships. Sure, there were regulatory agencies and accountants up the kazoo, but money is also power: the paper dollar would get returned to the owner, but the whole time it was out of his hands, its power was being used against him.
In a free market, millions of voters can vote with their wallet. It’s a form of democracy. But for hapless sleepy investors in a pension plan — sometime in the 1980s that power to choose the kind of industries and values they wanted to support was silently given away to a guy called Larry Fink and a few of his colleagues.
Snoozing-at-the-wheel, citizens voted for cheap energy every two years, while their money voted for “ESG” every day. And ESG is the expensive Environmental, Social, Governance kind of electricity which freezes your peas AND corrects the weather (in theory).
The size of the pension funds managed by the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard […]
By Jo Nova
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock. | Bloomberg
Two wins. BlackRock has agreed to Ron DeSantis’ demands that Florida’s state pension funds can’t be used for eco-activism fantasy quests (like ESG*). Now they have to be used to make profits for the people those funds belong to. That’s not much of a win you might think, since that’s just a return to “the world we thought we were living in”, but in the World of Absurd it’s popping a very important bubble. Possibly “the” most important bubble — the loose money driving the trainwreck of stupid investments and sabotage-like-boycotts.
Secondly — Larry Fink feels hurt. The glitter-wheels are falling off the climate fund-wagon. The CEO of BlackRock was running around the world acting like the third largest nation on Earth. He was waving ten trillion dollars of other people’s money and bossing people into joining his cult. That party is coming undone.
BlackRock are the financial Climate Police disguised as a Monster Investment Fund but the anti-woke movement is gaining ground:
BlackRock’s Fink says climate and ESG-investing attacks getting ugly, personal
By Rachel Koning Beals, MorningStar
By Jo Nova
Move over divestment and boycott — and move in activist shareholders wielding other people’s money. After naive shareholders sold out, they didn’t have much influence over a company. But if they bought enough shares instead, they could practically run the place.
Good people left their money unguarded in pension plans and it came to be used against them.
The three largest asset managers in the world are BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. They swept up the retirement money left unwatched in accounts Big-Government forced everyone to have. The Big Three now manage $20 trillion dollars combined. They also happen to want to end fossil fuel use and save the world — because they are nice people, right. So we face the dilemma — The citizens rejected NetZero, but the citizen’s money gives the power to men like Larry Fink, head of Blackrock, to harrass the boards of oil and energy companies in order to get NetZero through the back door.
To appreciate how influential these monster funds are, ponder that they are the largest shareholders in nine out of ten of the S&P 500 Index companies and lately, they have been buying up US power utilities.
[…]
Good News: The best hope of unwinding the unholy alliance between Big-Money and Big-Government comes from the US States and they are starting to sink their teeth in.
BlackRock is the defacto Global Climate Police — but disguised as a monster investment fund. The way to break it is to expose that its primary interest is not in making money for its clients but as a Woke political tool.
BlackRock are able to intimidate most of the world with $10 trillion dollars in assets. They are effectively the third biggest “country” in the world by GDP. But it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients. And once those clients figure it out and pull their funds, BlackRock will become an empty shell. Couldn’t happen to a nicer company…
It’s a scam where BlackRock target legal corporations in states that voted to use fossil fuels to effectively undo what the voters wanted. A few months ago, 19 States in the USA started asking BlackRock and the US SEC some hot and hard legal questions. West Virginia announced they would boycott firms that boycott fossil fuels, and […]
by Jo Nova Banks suddenly threaten to abandon the Glasgow GFANZ “climate action” group
It was the massive miracle-funding coalition of Glasgow but it is already starting to unravel as the banks figure out that conspiring to force “climate action” puts them at risk of antitrust suits.
A month ago I wrote that 19 US States were pointing out that it’s not OK for asset managers like BlackRock and co to join together in cartels to block investment in fossil fuels. These corporations bragged about belonging to groups like GFANZ (the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero) as if it made them into saintly environmentalists. But belonging to the group meant they are also effectively restraining trade, reducing competition and acting against the interests of their clients and against the wishes of voters.
Don’t underestimate how important this is or how ugly these monster cartels are: GFANZ has attracted some 500 members which control $130 trillion in assets. But the carbon targets they are told to aim for are set by the UN through something called the Race-To-Zero campaign. So this is a quasi World Government in cahoots with world bankers. Like a Great White Shark meets a pod […]
The rise of the tech giant billionaires, the crime, corruption, wokery, war, inflation, climate witchcraft, and the Big-Pharma reckless experiment — is all made possible by the same thing, and it’s been coming for fifty years.
Everyone under 40 has lived their entire lives in the fairy-land-of-plenty borrowed from the future. But all bubbles come to an end.
The rot started with a corrupted currency, and now infects every corner of the world — weakening markets and minds and concentrating power obscenely. When our medium of exchange is undisciplined, everything else is too. There is injustice built right in to Fake IOU’s made from thin air — especially when some can borrow big and early and at low cost, while others have to wait to earn them slowly an hour at a time. In the inflation race, speed is everything. They devalue the incentives that drive people to make things better, faster, and stronger. It punishes the prudent hardworking savers, and feeds speculative greed.
This is what BlackRock’s influence came from, and Gates, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and the WEF. All of them rode the wave of easy money and easy loans. Through predatory purchases on credit, they were able to buy […]
Finally 19 US States are hitting back at BlackRock the financial behemoth, and not a day too soon.
A light in the tunnel…
Americasroof
By a pure dollar reckoning, BlackRock is the third largest “foreign entity” in the world, after the USA and China, but its core business, its reason for existing is a contradiction: it claims to be an asset manager but acts like a political power. With neither citizens, land nor an army, it’s a kind of toxic financial bubble on a roll — part illusion, but still swallowing economies, minds and electricity grids.
BlackRock is supposedly investing funds on behalf of its customers while using those same funds to promote Woke political agendas that its management may like, but that its own customers may disagree with. It’s a totalitarian force that consumes democratic choices by force of money. Finally some state legislators are calling out the contradiction. Does BlackRock serve its customers or “the management of BlackRock”?
BlackRock is enormous, but it’s not untouchable, and if retirees and State pension plans pulled their money and filed writs for breaches of law, the activist-agency could vanish overnight. BlackRock has $10 trillion in assets to wield […]
Jim.henderson
Some nice Banker people have turned up to give us the batteries we need to save the world. What could possibly go wrong?
The Leviathan BlackRock will soon spend a billion dollars on big batteries in Australia. It is the largest asset manager in the world — with some $10 Trillion in assets to direct. To put that kind of power in perspective, the entire GDP of Australia is about $1.4 Trillion, so if BlackRock chose to throw its weight around, to hypothetically, improve its chances of making a profit, it won’t need an army, it just needs to hint “nice business you have there”, and the path will presumably clear. There are only two countries on Earth with larger GDP’s — America and China.
If BlackRock was a country the Foreign Investment Review Board of Australia would need to pay attention to potential conflicts of interest. But as it is, BlackRock flies under that radar while it bullies other companies and governments to do things to “save the world” which also happen to make profits for BlackRock.
If say, the voters of Australia voted against Climate Action as electricity bills drew blood, it’s hard to imagine […]
So much for stranded assets then.
Is there any better proof that “believing” in climate action is just a fashion statement? For all the talk of the end of fossil fuels, the biggest and most powerful funds in the world sign up for their “Net Zero” clubs but pour money into oil, gas and coal, hither thither, anyway.
The 30 biggest funds in the world manage €42.5 trillion in assets. These funds are so big, they can move markets if they want too…
Soak in that hypocrisy
Larry Fink starred at Davos and other events pontification for years on the importance of “tackling climate change”, how it’s an investment risk, and on how “climate change will upend” the way we do business, and how we need to do “long termism“. But he’s the CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset management fund in the world and they don’t mind at all they profit from all the fossil fuels. They joined the Net Zero Asset Manager Alliance, but do almost nothing. Indeed, vocalizing about what bad investments fossil fuels are while investing in them, is like a reverse pump and dump. They’re just scaring off the competition.
In 2020 BlackRock virtuously promised […]
Because Big Bankers really want to save the Earth, right?
BlackRock, the 10 trillion dollar “global investment fund” is urging the Australian company AGL to shut Bayswater and Loy B Yang Coal Plants much sooner than planned. BlackRock is a NY based and as wikipedia says “Due to its power, and the sheer size and scope of its financial assets and activities, BlackRock has been called the world’s largest shadow bank.”
The move only got 20% support from investors. Australian investors largely said “no thanks”. Where are The Greens in exposing multinational powers that want to influence Australia — they’re part of the Big Banker Promotion Team.
BlackRock turns up the heat on AGL’s coal exit plans
Nick Toscano, Sydney Morning Herald
AGL faced an investor revolt on Wednesday, as more than 20 per cent of the company’s shareholders backed a resolution for the board to align the retirement of the Loy Yang A power plant in Victoria and its Bayswater station in New South Wales with a strategy to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
This would mean shutting Loy Yang A, the largest brown coal fired power plant in Victoria, […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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