Blackrock is the world’s largest money manager, managing well over ten trillion dollars of other people’s money. The longtime CEO is Larry Fink. He is both important and very self-important, but I would not drink beer with him.
This week, he made news, when he declared globalization killed by Putin’s war on Ukraine. He is wrong. Globalization has been terminal dead for years. It was born with a fatal flaw. The governing class took the benefits of globalization (economic growth) without paying the cost of globalization (re-education and relocation), resulting in greater concentrations of both wealth and income. This caused the “hollowing-out” of America that was so well described in J.D. Vance’s iconic 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy.
As a lifelong globalist and supporter of globalization, it pains me to admit I was wrong. Globalization works so well in theory but so badly in practice.
