{"id":22651,"date":"2017-02-04T10:10:31","date_gmt":"2017-02-04T15:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22651"},"modified":"2017-02-04T10:10:31","modified_gmt":"2017-02-04T15:10:31","slug":"its-time-we-talked-about-our-owners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22651","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time We Talked About Our Owners"},"content":{"rendered":"<header>\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/2017\/02\/02\/its-time-we-talked-about-our-owners\/\">It\u2019s Time We Talked About Our Owners<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p><strong>How vast asset managers impact \u201cour increasingly cartelized economy.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The world\u2019s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, was splashed across the front pages of the Spanish financial news yesterday. The firm\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/cincodias.com\/cincodias\/2017\/01\/31\/empresas\/1485897887_767358.html\" target=\"_blank\">had just raised<\/a>\u00a0raised its stake in Spain\u2019s telecoms giant Telef\u00f3nica to 336 million shares \u2014 the equivalent of 6.7% of Telef\u00f3nica\u2019s total capital, with a market value of just under \u20ac3 billion.<\/p>\n<p>In the short space of five months BlackRock has almost doubled its holdings and is now the largest owner of Telef\u00f3nica stock, ahead of Spain\u2019s second biggest bank, BBVA, which holds 6% of the shares. The asset manager has also expanded its participation in Telef\u00f3nica\u2019s international subsidiaries, raising its holdings in Telef\u00f3nica Deutschland to 0.76% and Telef\u00f3nica Brasil to almost 2%, making it the firm\u2019s biggest institutional shareholder.<\/p>\n<p>BlackRock is the largest institutional shareholder of Telef\u00f3nica\u2019s two main market rivals in Spain, holding 7.3% of Vodafone and 1.96% of part state-owned Orange. It\u2019s also the second largest investor in British Telecom, after Deutsche Telekom, with a 7.84% stake. In the U.S. market BlackRock has the third largest position in Verizon, with 6.17% of the capital, and the second largest position in AT&amp;T, with 5.84%.<\/p>\n<h3><strong>A Vast, Sprawling Empire<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>The US fund manager has built up such a vast, sprawling financial empire since its creation 29 years ago that it has even begun to draw unwanted attention from the academic world. Two blockbuster studies \u2013\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2427345\" target=\"_blank\">one<\/a>\u00a0by Einer Elhauge of Harvard Law School and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.law.harvard.edu\/programs\/olin_center\/papers\/pdf\/Elhauge_834.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">the other<\/a>\u00a0by Martin C. Schmalz of Stephen M. Ross School of Business and Jos\u00e9 Azar and Isabel Tecu of Charles River Associates \u2013 have confirmed that BlackRock and some other big funds have acquired such large shareholdings throughout the U.S. and global economy that they cause the companies they jointly own to compete less vigorously with one another.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s Time We Talked About Our Owners How vast asset managers impact \u201cour increasingly cartelized economy.\u201d The world\u2019s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, was splashed across the front pages of the Spanish financial news yesterday. The firm\u00a0had just raised\u00a0raised its stake in Spain\u2019s telecoms giant Telef\u00f3nica to 336 million shares \u2014 the equivalent of 6.7% of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14748,2203,14749,5660,743,6118],"class_list":["post-22651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-asset-managers","tag-blackrock","tag-cartelized-economy","tag-don-quijones","tag-spain","tag-wolf-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22652,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22651\/revisions\/22652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}