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BlackRock at Davos: The Billionaires Tell the Billions, Cut Back
22 January 2020
EIRNS—A new report by Oxfam says that the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than its 4.6 billion least wealthy people. News of this report is posted, where? On the website of the World Economic Forum, where some 120 of those billionaires are gathered. They are talking about making this “sustainable”—by making the 4.6 billion pay more in taxes and electricity bills, if they are to have electricity at all. Multi-decabillionaire Sir Michael (“Mousolini”) Bloomberg is, unusually for him, skipping this year’s Davos. He is too busy “campaigning”: spending hundreds of millions of his huge wealth bludgeoning 325 million Americans to pay new taxes, abandon coal, forget cheap electricity, and dump their President. BlackRock is being represented in World Economic Forum presentations by billionaire Larry Fink (CEO), and Vice-Chairman Philipp Hildebrand, one of the four (former central banker) authors of BlackRock’s “regime change” report this year at the central bankers’ annual event at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That report not only proposed that central banks take over fiscal policy from governments and print helicopter money for governments, institutions, etc.; it also acknowledged the failure of quantitative easing over a decade. Thus BlackRock’s central banker “regime change” was not only a scheme to fund Green new deals, but a desperate attempt to print enough new monetary aggregate to rescue failing debts and save the financial system from crashing down. Hildebrand’s “fundamental reshaping of finance” message has already been featured in a Bloomberg interview from Davos, in which he praises Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, he of the global central bank digital currency to replace the dollar. “Governor Carney has been and is at the forefront in pushing this,” said Hildebrand, referring to the green “reshaping.” BlackRock operates funds which invest $7 trillion in assets for institutional and personal investors. A large portion are invested in stock, bond, or derivatives indexes, as requested by these investors, and therefore BlackRock cannot simply use that capital to blackmail—or greenmail—corporations into abandoning coal, oil, and nuclear, and getting into green boondoggles. But Hildebrand claimed that “The index operators are very much on board” with imposing “sustainability risk” penalties on fossil fuels. “We’ve made it clear that we expect companies to live up to their disclosure responsibilities to earn investments.... This will involve substantial changes in capital allocation and profitability.” But there must also be the “green” stick of governments, he stressed. “There will be laws, there will be regulations.” He could have added, there will be taxes. “This is a government problem. We cannot reach the Paris [COP21] goals in the absence of coordinated, sustained government policies.” |