by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(Corbett Report) So, you’ve watched How BlackRock Conquered the World and you’re now aware of how this financial behemoth with trillions of dollars of assets under management has taken over vast swaths of the economy. You know how BlackRock is one of the top institutional investors in seemingly every major Fortune 500 company, and you understand how Fink and the gang are leveraging this incredible wealth to wield political and social power, directing industry and ultimately steering the course of civilization.
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And since you did watch that podcastumentary to the very end, you’ll also remember how I pointed out that the top institutional investor in most of these companies is not BlackRock, but The Vanguard Group.
So what is The Vanguard Group? Where did it come from? What does it do? And how does this financial colossus fit into the overall BlackRock/ESG/Net Zero plan for the future of the (controlled) economy? Good questions! Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work answering them.
The Rise of Vanguard
Just as the official history of BlackRock starts with the humbling of a rising star of the financial world—with BlackRock founder Larry Fink having supposedly learned a valuable lesson in risk management after he lost $100 million in a single quarter at First Boston investment bank—the Vanguard story, too, begins with the lemons-to-lemonade tale of a financial whiz kid.
In the Vanguard case, the story starts with John Clifton “Jack” Bogle, a titan of the financial industry whose conservative investment ethos was forged, we are told, in the crucible of The Great Depression. Born in New Jersey in May 1929—just months before the great stock market crash that wiped out his family’s fortune, drove his father to alcoholism and, ultimately, led to his parents’ divorce—Bogle was forced to buckle down and excel at his schoolwork even as he worked an assortment of jobs to help keep the family afloat.
Beating the odds, Bogle ended up getting a scholarship to study economics at Princeton. But, being an average student at a prestigious institution full of bright, ambitious young phenoms, Bogle knew he would have to produce a stellar senior thesis in order to stand out. Vowing to write about something that had never been covered before, he found his thesis topic in the pages of the December 1949 issue of Fortune magazine: the mutual fund industry.
Mutual funds, Investopedia informs us, are financial vehicles that “pool assets from shareholders to invest in securities like stocks, bonds, money market instruments, and other assets.” They had existed in the US in various forms since the late 19th century, but it was a series of acts passed by Congress in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash—including, most notably, the Investment Company Act of 1940—that paved the way for the explosive growth of the mutual fund industry in the mid-20th century. Bogle just happened to read the right article at the right time to catch the very first wave of what would eventually become a financial tsunami.
If Bogle had hoped to turn his flagging academic career around with his thesis, he succeeded. Not only did the thesis lead to a magna cum laude diploma from Princeton, it even caught the eye of Walter Morgan, founder of the prestigious Wellington Fund, the first balanced mutual fund in the United States. Morgan offered the young whiz kid a job at Wellington Management Company, the firm that managed the fund, and Bogle set out on what would become a storied career.
Becoming an assistant manager in 1955, Bogle oversaw a period of explosive growth for the firm and the mutual fund industry as a whole. He persuaded management to capitalize on the public’s growing interest in such investments by creating a new fund composed solely of equities, the Wellington Equities Fund. The new fund’s success and Bogle’s hard work cemented his position as Walter Morgan’s hand-picked successor. He would go on to become president of the company in 1967 and CEO in 1970.
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