Laurence Fink has been a finance man all his life. He first
began his career with New York-based investment bank First Boston in 1976. He
was good enough to eventually head the bank’s bond department.
While at First Boston he made distinctive accomplishment;
this includes becoming one of the first mortgaged-backed security traders
in Wall Street. Fink started the
Financial Futures and Options Department of the bank. He was a member of the Management Committee; among
other units he headed was the Mortgage and Real Estate Products Group.
Fink is reported to have added $1 billion to the bottom
line of First Boston. Proving himself only human he is said to have also lost
$100 million by making the wrong prediction on where interest rates were headed
in 1986.
Fink co-founded BlackRock
in 1988 and was the Director and CEO of the company. BlackRock was at that time
part of The Blackstone Group. It split from The Blackstone Group in 1994, became
fully independent in 1998, and emerged as a publicly traded company in
1999. Fink retained his CEO position
during those changes and is now also the Chairman.
He has had great success leading BlackRock and they were
more than enough to cover of some of his setbacks. The most notable was a Manhattan
real estate deal which took $5.4 billion to execute in 2006. It ended in default
and among the biggest losers were the California Pension and Retirement System
which lost around $500 million.
Fink made a brilliant move in merging with Merrill Lynch Investment
Managers in 2006 which doubled the asset management portfolio of BlackRock. He
is so highly regarded that the U.S. government asked BlackRock to help in
cleaning up the mess due to the financial meltdown in 2008. The purchase of Barclays Global Investors in
2009 turned BlackRock into the largest money-management company in the world
with now $3.5
trillion in assets.
Fink earned a B.A. in political science in 1974 and an MBA
in 1976 both from the University of California, Los Angeles.
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