Blackrock owns America’s homes – and a whole lot else
Blackrock owns America’s homes – and a whole lot else
If you’ve been thinking of buying a house, you’ve probably noticed that house prices are soaring everywhere, not just in the usual preferred zip codes. You might have thought this is simply because of market deformations thanks to COVID and the lockdowns. In fact, the soaring prices reflect something much more sinister: Blackrock, an investment company is buying up housing stock, turning America into a nation of renters – that is, people with no stake in their communities or their futures. However, what’s really sinister is that it’s not just housing stock. BlackRock, along with The Vanguard Group, owns a disproportionate number of American corporations, more even than you realize.
Let’s start with the housing stock issue. Here’s a short Tucker Carlson segment about the way the multinational investment company BlackRock is driving up prices and decreasing housing stock by buying up whole communities:
What Tucker and Pedro Gonzalez describe is bad and should have you deeply worried. What’s worse is something I learned about some months ago but sat on because I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.
It’s a video made by a Dutch woman in which, using publicly available information, she points out that very few corporations are the personal playgrounds of millionaires and billionaires. Instead, most of them trace back to BlackRock and The Vanguard Group. For example, if you think Coke and Pepsi are competitors, they might be at a micro level but, at a macro level, both have the same primary owners: BlackRock and The Vanguard Group:
(I CAN'T GET THE VIDEO TO TRANSFER FROM THIS ARTICLE. GO TO THE SOURCE TO WATCH IT)
If you don’t want to watch the video or don’t have 45 minutes to spare, you can read the transcript here. The following is just one segment of the video to give you a flavor of the video:
Facebook is the owner of Whatsapp and Instagram. Together with Twitter, they form the most popular social media platforms.
Alphabet is the parent of all Google companies, like YouTube and Gmail but they are also the biggest investor in Android, one of the two operating systems for nearly all smartphones and tablets.
The other operating system is Apple’s IOS. If we add Microsoft, we see four companies making the software for nearly all computers, tablets and smartphones in the world.
Let’s see who are the biggest shareholders of these companies.
Take Facebook: we see that 80% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.
These are the same names that came up in the food industry; the same investors are in the top three.
Next, is Twitter. It forms with Facebook and Instagram the top three.
Surprisingly, this company is in the hands of the same investors, as well. We see them again, with Apple and even with their biggest competitor, Microsoft.
Also, if we look at other big companies in the tech industry that develop and make our computers, TVs, phones and home appliances, we see the same big investors, that together own the majority of the stock.
It’s true for all industries. I’m not exaggerating.
When I first watched the video, I decided that it was too conspiratorial for my taste or, as I like to describe it, something using imaginary dots to connect invisible lines. I might have ignored it forever if it hadn’t been for Tucker’s segment about BlackRock. And with the recent revelations about Bill Gates, it suddenly mattered that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation (which I long presumed to be entirely corrupt) have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, most or all of which are tied to Vanguard and BlackRock.
Once upon a time, I might also have shrugged off concerns about institutional investors owning everything. After all, institutional investors are what enable ordinary people, through mutual funds and other large funds, to have a chance at investing in the stock market – and, moreover, to have professionals manage their money.
However, I recently began rethinking that viewpoint when I realized that the fact that institutional investors ultimately own the shares in most corporations probably explains why there haven’t been shareholder lawsuits when corporations have made social justice decisions that caused their shares to decrease in value (e.g., Gillette’s woke ad). While ordinary shareholders might once have objected, the institutional shareholders don’t – because they hold the same values as the woke corporations. Everything is intended to steer American society (and European society) in a single direction.
So maybe this is all lunatic fringe craziness or maybe Tucker’s point about BlackRock and that Dutch lady’s video point the way to something that ought to worry us a lot.
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