BlackRock, the world’s largest money management firm, reported first-quarter profits of $1.2 billion, up 49 percent compared to $802 million in 2020’s first three months.
The firm’s share value rose from $5.15 to $7.77 year on year.
BlackRock cashed in on a surging stock market powered by rock-bottom interest rates and stimulus spending at a time when investors were in search of higher yields and encouraged by the prospect of an economic recovery, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The company took in $171.6 billion in new cash from investors during 2021’s first quarter, compared to $35 billion a year earlier. BlackRock’s trademark line of exchange-traded funds collected $68 billion in new cash investments through the first three months of this year; they garnered $13.8 billion in the same period in 2020.
“There’s a lot of money in motion today,” BlackRock CEO Lawrence Fink said in a 15 April analysts call reported by the WSJ, “but many investors continue to keep a significant amount of cash on the sidelines.”
BlackRock now has $9 trillion under management, according to the WSJ, about as much as the combined GDPs of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
TREND FORECAST: We note this article to further illustrate how the Bigs keep getting bigger and the trend for the world’s wealth to be concentrated in the hands of a few continues to dramatically escalate. (See our 23 March article, “$4 TRILLION FOR BILLIONAIRES AS MIDDLE CLASS SINKS.”)
