With markets on edge, a top Wall Street influencer tiptoes around politics

New York (CNN) — Each year, when the Larry Fink letter goes out, it’s required reading on Wall Street. The CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, pens a memo to shareholders that quickly becomes gospel. It was Fink’s 2018 letter, for example, that helped catalyze interest in do-gooder investing known as ESG (for environmental, social and governance) — a term he later swore off amid Republican backlash.

Investors and the financial media tune in so closely because Fink’s firm controls an $11.5 trillion empire that influences the market through sheer volume. The annual letter is the finance bro equivalent of Oprah’s Favorite Things.

This year, though, Fink’s letter is getting noticed as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it says.

In sum: private capital markets, retirement savings and “democratizing” investing are in.

What’s out? Anything political.

You won’t find the words “tariff” or “Trump” anywhere in Fink’s 27-page missive, despite the fact that global markets are on a knife’s edge ahead of the president’s plans to slap tariffs on trillions of dollars worth of US imports, raising the risk of tipping the world’s biggest economy into a recession. Gone are any mentions of “stakeholder capitalism,” the theory that businesses do better when they broaden their metrics of success to include not only profits but the wellbeing of their workforce, customers and communities. And without mentioning fossil fuels, Fink emphasizes the need for “energy pragmatism.”

None of this is terribly surprising.

Fink’s letters have recently shied away from acronyms like “DEI” that the right has seized upon. BlackRock, which employs some 21,000 people, scrapped its own “aspirational workforce representation” objectives last month, citing “significant changes to the US legal and policy environment related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” per Bloomberg reporting. (Translation: We don’t want to give the White House a reason to be mad at us right now.)

“He’s definitely retreated,” Jon Solorzano, a partner at Vinson & Elkins who counsels companies on corporate governance and sustainability, told me. “I think for better or for worse, Larry Fink probably became the face of the ESG movement and probably felt a lot of blowback… I don’t think he’s going to be sticking his neck out because he’s gotten his head bit off a few times.”

The timing is also noteworthy, as BlackRock is in the middle trying to acquire two ports in the Panama Canal that are currently owned by a Hong Kong conglomerate. If the deal goes through — it’s currently under review by Chinese regulators — it would (sort of) fulfill one of the president’s promises “take back” control of the waterway.

It also tracks with the rest of Corporate America’s rhetorical heel-turn on the values it once claimed to be sacrosanct in the face of legal threats from the Trump administration.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has dismantled DEI efforts in the federal government and pressured private companies to fall in line. Most recently, the Federal Communications Commission announced Friday it was investigating ABC and its parent company, Disney, to ensure that they have not been violating employment regulations through “forms of DEI discrimination.”

Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s and Goldman Sachs and others have also rolled back or tweaked their DEI policies to avoid ending up in the crosshairs.

The silly part of all this is that the administration hasn’t really laid out what it considers an “illegal DEI” program, as my colleague Nathaniel Meyersohn notes. So companies are just kind of doing a Control+F for diversity and eradicating whatever they find. (Except Costco, which is putting up a pretty stiff resistance to right-wing pressure and doubling down on its reputation as a company that is, like, really nice to its employees. Apple, too, is standing firm on its DEI initiatives.)

Bottom line: Larry Fink is an elder statesman of sorts whose influence over other firms’ strategies is hard to overstate. His 2025 letter, in leaving out anything that would have even a whiff of, as the French say, “le woke,” sends a clear message to fund managers and business leaders the world over: Keep your head down. Because if BlackRock can’t stomach a legal fight over DEI, who can?

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.