The Dawn of the BlackRock Era

Our government—its administration, its policymakers, and the policy itself—has long been beholden to various financial firms with massive balance sheets and influence, in both good times and bad. But the occurrence of destabilizing economic events, going back at least a century, has often resulted in one particular entity taking the reins. In 1907, for instance, a financial panic led to John Pierpont Morgan literally bailing out the country, a reflection of his and his bank’s underlying power as almost a government unto itself. (This led to reformers taking power from the banking system through the creation of the Federal Reserve, which didn’t precisely work out as planned.)