Germany will be the first country with a former BlackRock executive at the helm of government.

WERNER RÜGEMER

Germany will be the first country where a former BlackRock official becomes head of government. Friedrich Merz was not a "lobbyist," as is often described. He not only received a salary, but also held a leadership role within the group: the CDU politician was chairman of the Supervisory Board of the subsidiary BlackRock Asset Management Deutschland Aktiengesellschaft from 2016 to 2020. He reported to the New York headquarters of the largest capital organizer in the Western world, led by the United States. Merz was tasked with driving BlackRock's expansion in Germany..

Merz as a BlackRock official in Germany

Since the Supervisory Board's bonuses only amounted to €150.000 per year, he was awarded a consulting contract, the fees for which both parties have kept secret to this day. So, when it comes to a lot of money from people who already have a lot of money anyway—and especially when it comes to much, much more money—BlackRock/Merz not only keep quiet together, but also conceal their vast wealth in an organized manner. We'll get to that later.

During those years, Merz, a BlackRock official, organized and accompanied meetings between his boss at BlackRock, Larry Fink, who had flown in from New York, and then-Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) and his successor, Olaf Scholz (SPD). Merz also arranged meetings with Chancellor Helge Braun and Economy Minister Peter Altmaier, both CDU members, and Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel and State Secretary for Finance Jörg Kukies, both SPD members, all in secret.

During these years, BlackRock became Germany's largest shareholder, that is, the largest co-owner of one hundred of Germany's largest companies. And this was under Chancellor Angela Merkel's long-standing administration, who secretly approved everything without any conflict with Merz. Merkel's chief financial advisor, banker Lars-Hendrik Röller, head of the Federal Chancellery's Department of Finance and Economic Affairs, left with Merkel in 2021—and where did he go? To BlackRock, of course. Merz and Merkel may have their petty German conflicts with each other, but both kowtow to the great man.

Merz: No more connections to BlackRock?

When Merz also wanted to become CDU chairman after Merkel, our mainstream, capital-friendly media reported on the BlackRock-Merz connection, a little, but not on the meetings mentioned. They only came to light later, through a question from the Left Party in the Bundestag. When Merz finally became CDU chairman, he resigned from his position at BlackRock: otherwise, Merz would not have been so well received in the battle for votes – Merz is a quick-change artist, an extreme populist, an ideological chameleon. More on that later.

Merz no longer has any relationship with BlackRock. But it only seems that way to readers of Tagesschau-Glotzer and BILD. In January 2025, Fink invited his former employee to dinner at a luxury World Economic Forum hotel in the high-security zone of the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos. Merz was introduced to a group of "high-caliber" international investors and He was allowed to give a short speech outside the official program.  Fink is a member of the board of directors of the World Economic Forum, Merz is not.

Incidentally, as Fink walked along the road to the Davos hotel, a camera crew asked him some critical questions that aren't asked at official events. Fink, surrounded by bodyguards, remained silent, but took out his cell phone, He wordlessly photographed the interviewers twice and disappeared into the hotel. What do you think: Why did he take those photos and what did he do with them?

BlackRock & Co.: The Rise of Shadow Banks

In the United States, aided by deregulation in the 90s under President Bill Clinton, BlackRock rose to become the largest capital organizer in the US-led Western "securities community." The once powerful Wall Street banks in New York are now owned by BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Wellington, Fidelity, Capital Group, T Rowe Price, Geode Capital, and others.

They were the first to rise to the "America first" agenda. With the "financial crisis," they became even more powerful and also bought in the EU. They didn't have a crisis, but they did have a lot of money—namely, the capital of their super-rich clients. US President Barack Obama had given BlackRock a mandate of 150 million to manage the financial crisis. BlackRock thus became the largest intermediary in Western finance, including Europe. BlackRock managers became members of the US government under Obama and then again under Biden/Harris. BlackRock advises the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission on "sustainable" investment.

As a result, BlackRock not only became the largest shareholder, i.e. owner, in companies and banks in the US, but also in the rich countries of Europe, in England, France, etc., and incidentally also in Switzerland – and especially in Germany – as I have already said, with the help of Merz under Chancellor Merkel of the CDU.

Thus, with US$11 trillion, BlackRock co-owns some 18.000 companies and banks in the US-led West, including in multi-billion-dollar Asian cities like Singapore and Mumbai, India—a monopoly like this one that has never existed in capitalism, intertwined with governments, political parties, financial institutions, media, and lobby groups. And BlackRock is the main organizer of this "America first."

Great wealth: more invisible than ever

BlackRock raises its capital from billionaires. It doesn't manage the accounts of ordinary citizens and doesn't have to deal with the numerous accounts and crumbs of income of employees, workers, and pensioners. BlackRock & Co. is in the business of wealth management—in other words, making the super-rich even richer.

BlackRock has 70 branches, but only in the cities and states where the richest super-rich are located. In the US alone, there are 21 of these branches, in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Boston, Seattle, Miami, etc. BlackRock, for example, doesn't have a single branch in the Eastern European countries impoverished by the EU.

BlackRock & Co. remain unregulated; they are officially referred to—by the G7 states, the World Bank, etc.—as shadow banks. They have even more freedom than traditional banks and asset managers and can therefore make even greater profits. Aiding and abetting global tax evasion is also part of this wealth-free business. We'll talk about that later.

And BlackRock also orchestrates the invisibility of its super-rich clients. BlackRock is a black box. With its help, large private owners not only grow ever richer, but also become more invisible than ever before in the history of capitalism. And this invisibility, in turn, contributes to their becoming even more powerful, greedy, and dangerous, reducing workers' incomes, destroying democracy and the environment, and waging wars, which the comparatively small German helper Merz has long agitated for and is doing so now.

BlackRock branch in Germany: Invisible

In Germany, BlackRock manages private assets totaling €270.000 billion – this sum was announced by BlackRock in 2024, marking the 30th anniversary of its operations in Germany. This is roughly the same amount managed by Deutsche Bank with its 30.000 employees. But BlackRock only needs 170 employees to do this.

BlackRock only has accounts for the tiny minority of 0,001% of the super-rich, and a single, small, unmarked branch at Lenbachplatz 1 in Munich. There are no signs on the building's facade.

The black box was already in place here in Germany in 1994. Did anyone notice? But BlackRock had recorded it exactly: The lucrative sale of the GDR had impoverished many people in East Germany, and in West Germany, a few wealthy capitalists had become even richer—in other words, new clients. New clients for discreet asset management.

"The strange triumph of rotten America"

So what kind of society are BlackRock & Co. and its paid officers creating? Let's start with its ascendant and central state, the United States.

The US is "a brittle gerontocracy rotting from within." This widespread opinion is well founded, writes American politics professor Michael Beckley in Foreign Affairs., the magazine of the foreign policy lobby of major US corporations.

According to Beckley, 70% of American citizens consider the United States to be "poor" and "no good." Only 20% still trust the government, even though they voted for it. Two public attacks on one of the two candidates, Donald Trump, during the 2024 election campaign: this is as much a part of it as the recurring deadly riots, all routine, attracting brief and ritualized attention, and all returning to the rotten normal.

In 2024, the head of the insurance company United Health was shot and killed on the street in New York City by a young man: the insurer had denied him several treatments. He was arrested, but celebrated as a hero on social media, the dead CEO was showered with mockery, malice, and smiley emojis. Tens of thousands of Americans posted: "I was denied treatments too." Facebook deleted it all, much more quickly than usual.

United Health, the world's largest health insurer, is reaping particularly high profits thanks to particularly high rejection rates—profits that accrue to shareholders, in this order: BlackRock, then Vanguard, State Street, JP Morgan, and Fidelity.

In the United States, BlackRock & Co. are also the main shareholder groups in the fracking, pharmaceutical and agri-food industries, in cruise and entertainment companies, in Tesla, in Silicon Valley digital companies and in arms companies, as well as in major media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and major television networks, whether more liberal or openly right-wing such as Donald Trump's favorite network, FOX News.

The founding families of companies like Tesla, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon, with the help of their largest shareholder, BlackRock, have amassed fortunes of $200, $300, $400, or even $500.000 billion. They didn't need Trump to do it; Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Harris had already promoted him.

"Death of Despair"

Profits and stock market values ​​are higher than ever—at the same time, the US remains ahead of other capitalist democracies, which are also not doing well, in terms of poverty and disease, addiction, obesity, infant mortality, illiteracy, incarceration rates, homelessness, the number and size of slums, private over-indebtedness, Black labor, and all this combined with racism. Millions of wage earners "live" in their cars near their employers.

In no other country are there so many armed far-right groups and so much police violence against the lower classes, and so much impunity for wealthy white-collar criminals, including the sons of presidents like Hunter Biden and current President Donald Trump himself.

As documented American Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton in his book Death by Despair (Death of Despair), the United States leads the self-destruction of the degraded, impoverished, and lonely: through drug and alcohol addiction, violent crime, and killing each other. The most common use of the millions of privately owned firearms is suicide.

For two decades, life expectancy for the working class, including the middle class, has been declining in the US. At the same time, new American oligarchs, like Jeff Bezos, are investing billions in research: how can we extend our lives to at least 120 years, enjoy life on our yachts and in our Pacific Rim villas even in old age, and do so in good health?

The sources of profit for oligarchs – and BlackRock

Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and their shareholders BlackRock & Co. make their extreme profits through brutal practices: Tesla's Gigafactory not only in Fremont, California, but also in Brandenburg, Germany, has by far the highest percentage of emergency calls for injured workers. iPhones and other digital devices are assembled by invisible, exploited armies of millions of modern-day slave workers, mostly women, in impoverished countries ("Factory Asia"). Millions of illegal immigrants work in the United States; they are a pillar of the US economy, pay taxes, live in fear, are not allowed to vote, yet are blackmailed into cheap, invisible labor by the smear campaign against them and by constant deportations. This practice of extorting illegal immigrants was shown to me as early as 1984, at the chip manufacturer Intel, when I was researching the high-tech industry on-site in Silicon Valley.

This modernized slavery, which violates human rights, is one source of wealth; a second is the large-scale destruction that the agribusiness and fracking industries carry out deep in the soil and groundwater; a third is the spying on user data of individuals and businesses by equally unregulated monopolistic digital corporations, which also dictate price margins and are showered with government contracts and subsidies.

But the most important source of profit, according to foreign affairs author Beckley, is wars: their own wars and wars financed and supplied by the United States. The longer they last, the more profitable they are. Examples include World Wars I and II, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and, currently, Ukraine and Israel.

This includes arms exports to countries in US-led military alliances, such as NATO, and the costly ongoing operation of more than 800 US military bases in 80 countries and annexed islands around the world. This includes maneuvers and a permanent military presence on land, sea, and air. And last but not least, the supply of terrorist groups.

Ukraine: "Beacon of the power of capitalism"

Consequently, BlackRock is also the official coordinator for the "reconstruction" of Ukraine – as a major shareholder in the arms, energy, and fracking industries – which is all the more profitable for BlackRock the longer the war lasts and the more destruction is done beforehand.

Ukraine must become "a beacon for the power of capitalism," according to BlackRock boss FinkFor this "beacon," hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are being sacrificed on the altar of "Western values"—that is, profits for BlackRock & Co.—and burned, all the while going uncounted and hidden from their own public as if they didn't even exist. Not only are most of the profits and winners hidden, but so are the victims.

The deadly "paradox"

Beckley, author of Foreign Affairs, describes this simultaneous occurrence of a society rotting internally with the largest profit and war machine as a paradox. And, according to Beckley, he puts it quite coldly: A mortal danger emanates from this paradox, from this beacon of capitalism: "the paradox of American power may one day bring everything crashing down." The paradox of American power may one day destroy everything.

Of course, this is not a paradox at all, but a causal connection: the internally rotting society is the result of BlackRock & Co.'s extreme profit and war machine.

The American oligarchs and their "scientific" accomplices are well aware of this mortal danger to all humanity. Foreign Affairs is a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It is funded by major capitalists, the authors are members of former US governments and secret services, and many, like our author Beckley, are professors at elite US universities and think tanks, which are also funded by major capitalists—in Beckley's case, Tufts University and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

And, of course, BlackRock boss Fink is not only on the board of the World Economic Forum, but also on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.

BlackRock: The Ideological Chameleon

To secure their rotten oligarchic dominance, BlackRock & Co. act like ideological chameleons. Ruthlessly and unscrupulously, they declare the opposite of what they've previously declared when necessary.

BlackRock had grown in stature under the Democratic administrations of Clinton and Obama, but it hadn't been interrupted by Republican-led administrations. So Fink was slated to become US Treasury Secretary if Hillary Clinton won the election. But when Trump won and cut corporate taxes, Fink declared, "Trump is good for America."

BlackRock was then represented by managers in Joe Biden's successor administration, making it a political war party, and also provided the top advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. But with Harris's likely defeat in the 2024 presidential election and even before the election date, Fink declared: "No matter who wins, we are in talks with both candidates.» That's why BlackRock advised Trump on his choice of Treasury Secretary.

For years, Fink had preached climate and environmental protection and also advised the European Commission on the Green Deal. But even before Trump's new inauguration, Fink declared: "We are now leaving the climate protection alliance Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM)." This was immediately followed by EU President Ursula von der Leyen, but in any case, this is nothing more than one lie replacing another. After all, BlackRock and the EU have always adhered to the US standard: military production, exercises, and wars are excluded from climate balance sheets. That's why the "environmentalist" Green Party can do so well and wage climate wars.

In any case, in the US, BlackRock always finances both parties of capital at the same time. And both parties fight against all parties that defend the interests of the majority of the population. For example, the Obama/Clinton establishment brutally shut down its own promising candidate, Bernie Sanders, and even the Green Party is being attacked and minimized, without the German Greens protesting. This is another way BlackRock & Co. promotes the political development of the right in the US, Europe, and Germany.

BlackRock was represented by three managers in the liberal Biden/Harris administration. And now BlackRock is cooperating with the Trump administration, which is directly comprised of openly radical right-wing billionaires.

Werner Rügemer is a German journalist and writer. He has just published the book BlackRock. Germany. Die heimliche Weltmacht, ihre Praktiken in Deutschland und Friedrich Merz  (BlackRock Germany. The secret global power, its practices in Germany and Friedrich Merz).

This article is an excerpt from the original published in German by the portal After-deal pages.