Woke Leftwing Super-Investment Firm BlackRock Announces Layoffs After Suffering "Heavy Losses"

This is good news.

I wonder how much they had in FTX.

BlackRock plans to dismiss some 500 workers as the asset management company seeks to contend with heavy losses.

The company's assets under management declined from $9.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2021 to $8.0 trillion in the third quarter of 2022, according to the firm's most recent earnings report. The reduction in headcount, which represents less than 3% of the BlackRock workforce, occurs after one of the worst years for the stock market in history and similar layoffs in other industries.

Thomas Paine clarifies that losing $1.5 trillion in assets under management means they've lost that much in customer money they have control over. They haven't "lost" that money as in it was theirs and now it's gone, but they used to have control over and were making fees and interest off of investing in it, and now aren't. So they've lost, if I can do some quick arithmetic, almost one-sixth of their total investment pool, which will put a huge dent in their revenue.

Plus, we know they also had "heavy losses" -- we just don't know how much those losses were. The only numbers we have are for their loss of assets under management. But they also lost actual money, in addition to losing assets under management.

The losses come amid BlackRock executives' promulgation of the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement, also known as ESG, by which managers commit themselves to pursue green energy, appointing minorities to serve as managers, or otherwise blending profitability with activism. BlackRock has taken "voting action on climate issues" against dozens of portfolio firms, according to a company stewardship report.

Critics say the recent poor performance of ESG funds discredits the movement.

"This is just the beginning. As more and more clients, including state pension funds, realize that BlackRock has been misusing the assets entrusted to them to push a radical political agenda, the more the company will suffer," Consumers' Research Executive Director Will Hild said about the BlackRock dismissals in remarks provided to The Daily Wire.

Speaking of Woke Corporations going broke, an activist investor in Disney has launched a proxy fight to take control of the company's board, saying Disney's woes are "self-inflicted."

A proxy fight is a bid to get stockholders to lend your their votes -- their proxy votes, that is -- so that you can use those votes to elect board members of your preference. He would be mounting a persuasion campaign targeted at Disney shareholders to convince them that the current board is garbage and badly managing the company.

Which shouldn't be that hard.

[T]he company also disclosed that it is facing a proxy fight from activist investor Nelson Peltz and his fund Trian Partners. Trian has nominated Peltz to serve on the board. In a presentation published on Jan. 11, the investment firm described many of Disney's challenges as "self-inflicted" and advocated for the entertainment giant to restore its dividend by fiscal year 2025, seek more "efficiencies and additional profits" and expressed concern that Disney management's direct-to-consumer streaming push with Disney+ "failed to effectively communicate the financial rationale behind the strategic pivot."

They're not mentioning Disney's Woke, "Not-So-Secret Gay Agenda," but they are making note of the effects of that agenda:

Peltz' fund went on to elaborate its concerns with Disney+, adding: "We are surprised that Disney's best-in-class IP, franchises, and scale have not led to in-line, if not superior, unit economics compared with Netflix, which generally lacks high quality, franchise IP." It also claimed that Netflix is more cost effective in its production and programming costs compared to Disney.

How did you take three four billion dollar plus production companies -- Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar -- and reduce them to minor-to-mediocre players in just five years?

I'll just mention Kamran Pasha's conspiracy theory again: his theory, which is his theory and not mine so no one sue me, is that Disney's CFO put a lot of their money into FTX and lost it, and this explains the mad panic to fire Bob Chapek on a Sunday night via a hastily arranged meeting while Chapek was at an Elton John concert, because they had to fire him before he had a look at the books and noticed several billion dollars had vaporized.

He claims further vindication in the fact that Susan Arnold has just been forced to step down from Disney's board. She was a Chapek backer. He claims this is part of the cover-up.

I'm not telling anyone to believe this. I'm just saying it's an Interesting Theory that Some Guy On the Internet Said.

I would say generally that there must be some companies out there that have been badly burned by FTX that we don't even know about yet. Whether Disney's one of them, I don't know.

posted by Ace at 01:10 PM

| Access Comments