Goliath

摘要

Larry fink, the boss of BlackRock, a $3.7 trillion asset-management colossus, collects American folk art and is particularly fond of weather vanes. It is an appropriate interest for someone whose job it is to predict and react to the market's mercurial movements. BlackRock has dodged the worst storms of the crisis: it is now the largest financial institution in the world measured by assets under management. But that brings problems of its own.The past three years have boosted BlackRock's stature on Wall Street dramatically. In 2009 Barclays, a capital-hungry British bank, agreed to sell its investment-management unit, Barclays Global Investors (bgi), to BlackRock for $13.5 billion. The deal more than doubled BlackRock's assets and diversified the firm's product line-up: bgi owned iShares, the biggest name in exchange-traded funds (etfs), a rapidly growing $1.4 trillion industry.