BlackRock: America's New Landlord

BlackRock gobbles up US real estate, out-bidding working Americans as evidence of CEO Larry Fink's role in crafting the Fed's COVID rescue plan is revealed

According to a Wall Street Journal report, BlackRock – a Wall Street investment bank owned by billionaire financial titan Larry Fink – is buying entire neighborhoods at an average bid of 25-50% above the asking price and paying in straight cash, crushing the American Dream of home-ownership. BlackRock, as well as many other multi-billion financial firms, then converting these single-family homes into rentals. In cities such as Houston and Austin with hot housing markets, investors like Fink account for at least 25% of all home purchases. Essentially, this is a sweeping move to turn the United States into a nation of renters. However, certain financial journalists in the media say that this should not be feared but actually embraced. For example, Derek Thompson at The Atlantic says that this is a way for America to improve its unaffordable housing market because BlackRock will fix up houses that need repairs and that these institutionally owned rentals only account for a small percentage of the greater American housing market (so far). He also mentions that it is good for Americans to not own homes since they want to be increasingly mobile. But what Thompson leaves out is the fact that this speculative buying and financialization of the housing market will lead to artificial increasingly higher prices on the market and that home-ownership is the number 1 way to build and transfer inter-generational wealth in America. Thompson also forgets about how Wall Street crashed the American housing market through over-financialization just 13 years ago and blames local governance and even your neighbors instead of those with actual power.

A nation of renters means that multi-billion dollar financial institutions are now your landlord. And when companies operate on that scale, it is all about cushioning the bottom line. They will run the math of how little home safety improvements can be done and compare that with the cost of the potential civil lawsuits that they will have to fight off in court. They do not care about you. They are only looking at the aggregate costs for their bottom line. And this is not just a cynical perspective, we know this for a fact if you read anything about what happened in 2008. All this is part of a broader scheme to own the assets in the market so when rent prices skyrocket due to reckless speculative trading, they can just kick renter families out of their homes and bring in a wealthier family.

Now that we have discussed this race to own America’s housing market, it is important to understand Larry Fink’s role in our government’s economic policy. As Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (our favorite Goldman Sachs goon and a principal architect of the 2008 financial crisis rewarded this position for his unwavering loyalty to screwing the American worker) worked to save downward spiraling pandemic markets in 2020, they kept near-constant contact with a Wall Street executive whose firm stood to benefit financially from the rescue plan: Mr. Laurence “Larry” Fink.

Fink was in “frequent touch with Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Powell in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency rescue programs were announced in late March” according to emails obtained by The New York Times through a public records request. Mr. Fink worked alongside the highest economic officials in our government on a financial rescue that BlackRock referred to as “the project” that they were “working on together” with the Fed. Very spooky. The newly released emails obtained by the Times show the extent to how intertwined BlackRock and other enormous private financial companies have become with the federal government. Mnuchin and Powell were on more calls with Fink and even Larry Kudlow than President Trump. So who really runs our federal government’s economic policy?