BlackRock chairman's letter to investors, 2023

About this letter

Laurence D. Fink, chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, wrote this letter dated 15 March 2023 and published it in the firm's 2022 annual report. In recent years he had written two letters annually, one to chief executives on behalf of clients and one to BlackRock shareholders; this time he wrote a single letter to investors and shared it with all stakeholders.

It was written in the week federal regulators seized Silicon Valley Bank. After restating BlackRock's role as a fiduciary and marking the 35th anniversary of the firm's founding, Fink turns to markets and the economy: the price of years of easy money, a more fragmented global economy, a silent crisis in retirement, and how clients can navigate and invest in the energy transition, before closing with his reflections on the year ahead.

What to notice

1. 1

   Fink frames the stress as falling dominoes: years of easy money ending in rapid rate rises, then asset-liability mismatches like SVB's, and possibly a third, liquidity mismatches among asset owners who traded liquidity for returns.

“But the money doesn’t belong to these people. It’s not ours either.”