Laurence Douglas Fink co-founded BlackRock in 1988 and built it into the world's largest asset management firm with over $10 trillion in assets under management. Fink pioneered the mortgage-backed securities market at First Boston in the late 1970s — the same financial instruments whose proliferation would trigger the 2008 crisis. When that crisis hit, the Federal Reserve and Treasury gave BlackRock no-bid contracts to manage toxic assets in all three Maiden Lane special purpose vehicles. During the 2020 COVID pandemic, the Fed again turned to BlackRock, which purchased its own ETF products using Federal Reserve money. BlackRock's Aladdin platform processes $21.6 trillion in assets globally, and the firm manages the majority of the federal Thrift Savings Plan covering millions of government employees and military members.
Contract values are summed from documented money flow chains where this entity appears as a source or destination node. Amounts are drawn from USASpending.gov, FEC filings, SEC EDGAR, or LD-2 lobbying registrations.
Donor contributions aggregate documented amounts from the donor_interests table, sourced from FEC individual and PAC contribution filings.
Connected officials are elected officials in our database with a mapped relationship (lobbying, board membership, campaign contribution, etc.) to this entity.
Annualised flow represents the total documented dollar amount traced through money flow hops involving this entity. Where hop-level amounts are unavailable, the chain-level documented total is used as a conservative upper bound.
All figures are drawn from public filings. Estimates are conservative — undisclosed transactions, dark money, and vanish-point hops are excluded from totals. This is a minimum documented floor, not a ceiling.
