With markets on edge, a top Wall Street influencer tiptoes around politics

Each year, when the Larry Fink letter goes out, it’s required reading on Wall Street. The CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, pens a memo to shareholders that quickly becomes gospel. It was Fink’s 2018 letter, for example, that helped catalyze interest in do-gooder investing known as ESG (for environmental, social and governance) — a term he later swore off amid Republican backlash.

Each year, when the Larry Fink letter goes out, it’s required reading on Wall Street. The CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, pens a memo to shareholders that quickly becomes gospel. It was Fink’s 2018 letter, for example, that helped catalyze interest in do-gooder investing known as ESG (for environmental, social and governance) — a term he later swore off amid Republican backlash. Investors and the financial media tune in so closely because Fink’s firm controls an $11.5 trillion empire that influences the market through sheer volume. The annual letter is the finance bro equivalent of Oprah’s Favorite Things. This year, though, Fink’s letter is getting noticed as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it says. In sum: private capital markets, retirement savings and “democratizing” investing are in. What’s out? Anything political. You won’t find the words “tariff” or “Trump” anywhere in Fink’s 27-page missive, despite the fact that global markets are on a knife’s edge ahead of the president’s plans to slap tariffs on trillions of dollars worth of US imports, raising the risk of tipping the world’s biggest economy into a recession. Gone are any mentions of “stakeholder capitalism,” the theory that businesses do better when they broaden their metrics of success to include not only profits but the wellbeing of their workforce, customers and communities. And without mentioning fossil fuels, Fink emphasizes the need for “energy pragmatism.”