Larry Fink is the
third most influential person in the mutual
fund industry, the
48th most powerful person in the world and was last
year's
highest paid CEO in finance. Now, the
BlackRock chief has a
new title: nerd king. The title is courtesy of
Bloomberg BusinessWeek,
which last week
profiled Fink and placed an illustration of him and his brain on its cover.
BlackRock "makes most of its money through old-fashioned money
management rather than by taking positions for itself," write Sheelah
Kolhatkar and Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam in the
cover story
for the mag's Dec. 13-19 issue. "On Wall Street, whether boring is suddenly
better, Fink is the newly minted nerd king."
Topics tackled in the article include Fink's desire to continue
building the BlackRock brand, the work the firm has done for the
government and what Fink thinks of comparisons between his firm and
Goldman Sachs ("They're in such a different business. I don't want to
be in that business.").
The reporters also devote a portion of the article to fund performance.
"And for all its expertise in evaluating fixed-income assets, BlackRock's
own long-term track record in the area has been mediocre. In the three
years ended Sept. 30, funds represesnting only 55 percent of BlackRock's
fixed-income assets had beaten their respective benchmarks," they write.
As for BlackRock's 2009 purchase of Barclays Global Investors, including
the iShares business, the article includes a piece of trivia that some fundsters may not have previously known: the deal was "hatched" by
BlackRock president and co-founder
Robert Kapito during a Yankees game.
Edited by:
Armie Margaret Lee
Stay ahead of the news ... Sign up for our email alerts now
CLICK HERE
Subscribe to MFWire.com's News Alerts [click]
Email & Route 
Print 
Raw XML
