BlackRock & The Great Reset (Part 2)
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| Author       | Source       | 
| :-------------: |:-------------:|
|  [u/Exceedingly](https://www.reddit.com/user/Exceedingly/) | [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/ommfz1/blackrock_the_great_reset_part_2/) | 

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[DD 👨‍🔬](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/search?q=flair_name%3A%22DD%20%F0%9F%91%A8%E2%80%8D%F0%9F%94%AC%22&restrict_sr=1)

Welcome back. If you read all of [Part 1](https://reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/ommfn7/blackrock_the_great_reset_part_1/?) well done. This thing definitely got bigger than I originally intended.

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RECAP

Let's go over what we've covered. [BlackRock](https://i.imgur.com/EHtH9nB.jpg) is a giant wealth management company run by a guy called Larry Fink. Fink has been active on Wall Street for over 40 years and has become immensely powerful in the sense that even the US government turns to him for advice. BlackRock built a supercomputer which tracks the markets and it helps them avoid risky positions. I looked at GME ownership going back to 2017 and found evidence of Gamestop being shorted as far back as that. BlackRock had held millions of GME since 2017 when the price was around $25 and later sold millions of shares to Gamestop and Ryan Cohen when the price was around $5, so this came at great cost to them. Were BlackRock just helping Gamestop and RC out here? Fidelity and Dimensional Fund Advisors sold nearly all their GME in Q1 2021 and I believe this caused the Jan squeeze, this would be possible if their lent shares had been re-pledged many times over. I finished by saying Gamestop wasn't the only stock that squeezed in January that Fidelity had sold, we'll explore that below.

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5\. SHARE LENDING

-   Warning: I want to carry on looking at what happened around the January squeeze but I will be looking at some stocks other than GME. This is purely for educational purposes and I do have a reason for looking at other stock (spoiler: my conclusion is that there's just no other stock like GME, the conditions were set up too perfectly). Most of us know by now that other stocks had mini squeezes too, but nothing really compared to GME. User [/u/BurnieSlander](https://www.reddit.com/u/BurnieSlander/) recently wrote a post called [The Matrix is Everywhere a Quant DD](https://reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/nzajpv/the_matrix_is_everywhere_a_quant_dd/), which is an excellent write up on which stocks spiked in January, [this chart](https://preview.redd.it/qs0qkcborz471.png?width=1306&format=png&auto=webp&s=187408c522c47c0de806639890f3c8e62f810bdf) sums it up well. There you can see GME spiked from around $13 to $483, the biggest monetary increase of all these stocks. Yes a stock called KOSS had a big squeeze too in terms of % difference but GME squeezed the highest by far in terms of absolute value.

-   Purely out of curiosity I wanted to see if Fidelity sold any these stocks off too like they did with GME, lo and behold [Fidelity did sell a bunch of those other shares off too](https://i.imgur.com/UT3oV03.png). There's only 4 stocks from that above list that Fidelity didn't sell (OEG, LIVE, DAC and ACRS) and that's because they didn't hold any of the first 3 and they actually bought more ACRS, so Fidelity had nothing to do with any squeezes in these 4, but for the 21 I listed these could definitely have squeezed because of Fidelity thanks to the wonders of rehypothecation and the fact Ken likes to sell things he doesn't own. Dimensional Fund Advisors sold their GME too and I wanted to see if they sold any of these other stocks [but no it seems they only sold off their GME](https://i.imgur.com/BBwWElU.png).

-   I started thinking, if Fidelity sold off nearly all their supply of 21 particular stocks then was this down to a technical analysis reason? [/u/Bladeace](https://www.reddit.com/u/Bladeace/) 's post in the previous section to do with the 'Threshhold Securities' showed how choppy GME was getting, maybe it was something like this for the other stocks too that triggered Fidelity to sell? So I looked into BlackRock and Vanguard's holdings during Q1 this year, but found no evidence of these 2 selling much if any of these stocks. [BlackRock](https://i.imgur.com/I3Nyw8v.png) actually increased most of these positions rather than sell, same goes for [Vanguard](https://i.imgur.com/kRiJpXu.png). Now to me this says there was no underlying issue with these stocks and Fidelity just chose to sell them, otherwise companies like BlackRock & Vanguard would have dropped them too, right?

-   Just very quickly I want to explore a possible reason why the other stocks didn't squeeze as much as GME. We saw in Part 1 that Gamestop underwent a massive stock buyback in 2019 where they reduced available shares by 36 million. Out of the 25 stocks in [/u/BurnieSlander](https://www.reddit.com/u/BurnieSlander/) 's list above, only 6 other stocks underwent buybacks or kept the same number of available shares, and of those 6, 3 of those companies saw the biggest 'blip' price jumps during Jan (GME, KOSS & EXPR). The other 19 stocks actually made more shares available, which works against a short squeeze. [I made a shitty diagram to show the extent of this](https://i.imgur.com/wunHu1v.png) (yeah I'm a programmer not a graphic designer), from that we can see the other stock that had a buyback similar to GME was EXPR and these 2 stocks actually act nearly identically. KOSS is also nearly identical to GME in terms of its price chart, and although this stayed pretty much flat in terms of available shares it only had around 8 million shares available, so there weren't many for short sellers to play with. I just found it interesting that 19 companies seemed to help short sellers by releasing more shares, and those stocks didn't squeeze nearly as high as GME. I'm not saying available shares is the key to stocks squeezing high, but it definitely seems to reduce pressure during a squeeze. Final point here, I show on that diagram in the bottom right that AMC jumped from 85m outstanding shares last year to 450m shares this year. This move seems entirely counter-productive if you want to hurt short sellers and it's the exact opposite of what Gamestop did. This is possibly why MSM tried to divert so much attention to AMC, simply because that became way easier for shorts to close short positions on.

-   Going back to why Fidelity sold a load of stocks in Q1 2021, one of the most likely reasons comes from a risk of share lending. BlackRock has a very detailed [brochure on their share lending program](https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/literature/brochure/us-retail-securities-lending-brochure.pdf) and in this it says "The primary risk of securities lending is borrower default risk. Since BlackRock's lending program started, only three borrowers with active loans have defaulted. In each case, BlackRock was able to repurchase every security out on loan using the proceeds of the borrower collateral received and without any losses to our clients". I know these are BlackRock's words, but the same risk applied to Fidelity. The lenders of their shares probably started looking like they could default (security thresholds list, FTDs rising etc) so the safest thing to do was for Fidelity to recall these. Fidelity could then sell these shares when they were at peak squeeze prices, that's just good business. But one argument against this theory (i.e. risk of borrower default) is to ask, why didn't BlackRock and Vanguard recall their GME and other stocks too? My money right now is on the theory that Fidelity did this move purposefully to test how bad the shorting situation was.

-   Now let's look at another aspect of share lending; Collateral. When someone wants to borrow shares they have to put up collateral which is usually around 100% of the share's value and this is completely separate to the borrow fee that has to be paid. The collateral is there in case the borrower can't give back the shares, in that instance the lender just gets to keep the collateral to make up the difference. For this reason, further collateral can be requested by the lender at any time, usually following a price jump in the lent security. Increasing collateral like this makes sure the lender is covered as much as possible and this request for further collateral is a margin call for the borrower. I want to address [this meme post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/oizcqz/an_actual_unpopular_opinion/) by [/u/ringingbells](https://www.reddit.com/u/ringingbells/) where they ask what happened to the big margin call Melvin got around January. During the Jan squeeze, Melvin Securities got the huge margin call of $3.6 billion and this was likely from lenders like BlackRock and Vanguard who still likely had around 14.5 million GME lent out. Those 14.5 million shares would have been worth around $13 each pre Jan, so ($13 x 14.5m) = $188.5 million, but the price shot up to a peak of $483 during the Jan squeeze. If we average the closing price from the 4 biggest days of the squeeze (Jan 27th - Feb 1st) we get an average closing price of $273. Substitute starting price from this new peak price ($273 - $13) = $260 and multiply by shares ($260 * 14.5m) and we get $3.77 billion which is the new amount BlackRock and Vanguard are not covered for. Good business practices say that these two will want to margin call for this amount. Seems to add up, right?

-   Following on from that, the lender's right to ask for extra collateral is completely down to their discretion. They don't even have to ask for this if they want to take on the risk, and this explains how it was possible to have the $3.6 billion margin call reduced to $700 million, implying the DTCC pressured BlackRock & Vanguard to go easy on Melvin. The key message here is that BlackRock and Vanguard likely still have their GME lent out meaning they have Shitadel & Co's balls in their grip, would you really want to be on the wrong side of 2 companies who manage nearly $20 trillion between them? This also implies BlackRock and Vanguard hold keys for the MOASS in their hands, if that's true then it seems they've wanted to delay the MOASS up to now. I have theories on why this might be and we'll explore them in the next sections. Please note that I'm being very linear with the above margin calculations, there are too many variables to estimate this exactly, I'm just showing how it can add up to be down to BlackRock & Vanguard.

-   Here's my final point on share lending. I've been through a lot of company's documents relating to their share lending programs and BlackRock seems to be unique in that they're willing to accept [government backed securities](https://i.imgur.com/IeRVj8G.png) as collateral where other companies won't accept this. This would be things like US Treasury Bonds, where have we heard those mentioned before? Oh yeah, [Atobitt's 'The Everything Short'](https://reddit.com/r/GME/comments/mgucv2/the_everything_short/). I'm really hoping everyone has read that post, if not here's the summary: Shitadel owns a company called Palafox Trading and uses this to EXCLUSIVELY short & trade treasury securities. This meant Shitadel had easy access to UST bonds and could have used this as a cheap way to lend stock off BlackRock, as it meant they could avoid putting up a ton of cash as collateral. If you read Atobitt's post, it feels like he's digging for a connection between Shitadel and BlackRock via UST bonds and I believe this might be it. Remember, collateral is a huge issue to borrowers because it can result in $ billions in margin calls, if Shitadel can just conjure up $billions in UST bonds through their fuckery then to them this is the best way to borrow shares. This makes it seem like BlackRock made it easy for Shitadel to start shorting companies like Gamestop in the first place.

SUMMARY: I looked at Fidelity and how they recalled 21 different stocks which all squeezed in Jan, making me think Fidelity was behind the overall squeeze issue due to their shares having been rehypothecated. I looked at the other stocks which shot up in value and the ones which went up the most had previously kept their total outstanding shares the same or reduced the amount of shares available. Gamestop had reduced their shares by the most out of any stock and I believe this is a big part of the reason why it had the largest price peak in Jan; there really is no other stock like GME, it seems to have been orchestrated to hurt short sellers the most. I then looked at collateral in share lending and how it's likely that Melvin's $3.6 billion margin call was down to lenders like BlackRock and Vanguard who asked for more collateral during the Jan squeeze. I finished by showing how BlackRock was willing to accept US Treasury bonds as collateral in share lending, something no other big company seems to allow, so to me this suggests BlackRock gave Shitadel an easy way to get into share lending thanks to their fuckery via Palafox Trading (see Atobitt's ['The Everything Short'](https://reddit.com/r/GME/comments/mgucv2/the_everything_short/))

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6\. BLACKROCK'S EXPOSURE

-   [Despite some opinions](https://www.reddit.com/r/ShittyLifeProTips/comments/mpq87g/slpt_keep_all_of_your_eggs_in_the_same_basket/), the more eggs you have in one basket the greater your risk of losing them all in one go. For this reason the largest asset management companies like BlackRock stand to lose more from a crash than smaller companies, simply because they will lose value on a greater amount. BlackRock's stock portfolio is currently worth over $3 trillion and all of that would be at risk during a stock market crash.

-   In my extensive 6 months of following the markets, I've learned that one of the best ways to hedge against a crash is to buy 'put options'. If you don't know what these are, they're contracts that allow you to sell shares for a set pre-arranged price called the strike price, this allows you to sell shares above their current market value which is good if a market crash decimates the price of the shares. Typically investment companies don't want to sell shares unless they have to because stock should increase in value over time, so puts act like insurance where you can recoup value if shares drop in price. But puts are expensive, you pay a premium at the start and this costs more the longer you want the put contract to be open for. You can exercise the contract to recoup share value at any time, but once the contract expires it no longer covers your shares so you will have paid the premium for nothing (other than the knowledge you had hedged your bets). Additionally a single put contract covers 100 shares, so if you want to cover say 1 million shares, you would need 10k put contracts. The cost of the contracts is determined by the broker at the start, and it gets expensive (as all insurance does) so you don't want to buy puts unless you need to based on risk assessments.

-   It should be noted that you can get a lot more value out of puts than the cost to buy them initially. Here's an example; As I'm writing this Amazon shares currently sell for $3,681. I just checked a broker and a put contract expiring at the end of August to sell 100 Amazon shares with a strike price of $3600 (just below their current market value) costs $11,435. 100 Amazon shares currently cost $368,100 *but* if a market crash halved their value then you would lose $184k. At that point you could exercise the put contract which means you have $360k (minus the $11.4k premium) instead of $184k if you hadn't bought the puts. The more Amazon falls the more value for money you get out of the puts.

-   One additional note, people associate puts with short sellers and that's because they're usually the ones causing the share price to fall. Here they buy puts at the start, short stock to drop the price, then make money off the puts. But in essence there's nothing bad about puts, they can just act as insurance on stock investments. I don't even want to get into how puts are used to reset FTD timescales...

-   Institutions who manage over $100 million in assets have to declare their holdings including any options contracts (calls and puts). I decided to track BlackRock's puts to see how they've protected themselves in recent years. As a little noting point, Vanguard and Fidelity don't really have any puts in their 13f reports (unless it's confidential) so I can't dig into theirs, this is all just BlackRock's. I tracked BlackRock's total value of puts and also puts as a proportion of their overall stock portfolio value, those two charts [look like this](https://i.imgur.com/WQFIWeS.png). Straight away there's a few things we can tell from these graphs, the highest peak of puts were in Sep 2018 and Mar 2021 (almost as if they're expecting a crash any time now 😏), but what stands out to me is how little they protected themselves around the start of the pandemic (Dec 2019 to Mar 2020), [I highlighted the bits I mean here](https://i.imgur.com/XuoZ0Ik.png). That seems crazy because the 2020 economic crash was far bigger than the 2008 crash we all know about, so why the hell did BlackRock seem to go into the 2020 crash so unprepared? I'll talk about this properly in the next section because it really needs a lot of analysis.

-   I'll end this section by showing what BlackRock held in puts as of their latest filing (Q1 2021):

| COMPANY | COST OF PUTS |
| --- | --- |
| S&P | $6.7b |
| iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF | $2.5b |
| PowerShares QQQ Trust | $1.3b |
| iShares iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF | $220m |
| SPDR(R) Bloomberg Barclays High Yield Bond ETF | $129m |
| Anthem Inc | $89m |
| Bank of America | $67m |
| JPMorgan Chase | $67m |
| Morgan Stanley | $63m |
| iShares Russell 2000 ETF | $62m |
| ARK Innovation ETF | $58m |
| The Industrial Select Sector SPDR Fund | $32m |
| United Continental Holdings | $27m |
| American Airlines Group Inc | $11m |
| NRG Energy Inc Put | $8m |
| Delta Air Lines, Inc. | $7m |
| Commscope Holding Company Inc | $4m |
| Pitney Bowes Inc. | $3m |

-   At the start of this year, BlackRock was preparing for the S&P market index to tumble, some of the major banks and some large ETFs? Interesting. As a side note user [/u/Get-It-Got](https://www.reddit.com/u/Get-It-Got/) writes about the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF [in this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/ns7k6q/could_gamestops_liftoff_unravel_corporate_junk/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&context=3&utm_name=Superstonk&utm_content=t1_h1lw3ow), and does a far better job than I could so give that a read. Going back to the idea that Fidelity caused the Jan squeezes by recalling loads of stocks, BlackRock's puts data above suggests to me that they weren't actually sure what was going to happen from Fidelity doing that, almost as if there was a chance the MOASS could have happened in Jan. That's a powerful message to me; BlackRock with their cutting edge Aladdin system and the best analysts on the planet were unsure just how fucked the shorts were, so they bought a load of puts just in case.

SUMMARY: I tracked BlackRock's puts data history to see how they had prepared themselves in previous years, they seemed to be woefully unprepared for the 2020 economic crash. Additionally it was possible to see that BlackRock seems to have expected the MOASS to have gone off in Q1 this year as they bet against the S&P, some of the large banks backing Shitadel and some large ETFs. It's almost as if BlackRock with all their market data was unsure just how fucked Shitadel & Co were. Now let's explore the 2020 market crash in detail.

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7\. THE 2020 ECONOMIC CRASH

-   There was a massive market crash in 2020 that [looked like this on the S&P500](https://i.imgur.com/ytAeUap.jpg), red circle on the left for comparison to the 2008 crash. [Even BlackRock's share value plummeted during the 2020 crash](https://i.imgur.com/6fCewDY.jpg), which suggests that they did not protect themselves adequately for it (despite having Aladdin).

-   The curious thing about the 2020 crash was how short lived it was, the [Wikipedia article on it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_stock_market_crash) says "The 2020 stock market crash was a major and sudden global stock market crash that began on 20 February 2020 and ended on 7 April" so it lasted less than 2 months in all. For comparison [this site](https://www.thebalance.com/stock-market-crash-of-2008-3305535) says the 2008 crash took 18 months. So 2008 crash = 1.5 years, 2020 crash = 1.5 months. On face value those timelines look ridiculously different, but this could just be to do with how the government handled the 2020 crisis. We all know they pumped $ trillions in due to covid so maybe that just helped stop the crash before it got too bad? But let's dig a bit deeper.

-   The above Wikipedia article goes into the cause of 2020 crash and it seems to be a complicated issue with many different factors. It was largely to do with the pandemic but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Our wrinkly brained expert [/u/Criand](https://www.reddit.com/u/Criand/) explains it very well in his post called [The Bigger Short](https://reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/o0scoy/the_bigger_short_how_2008_is_repeating_at_a_much/) please read that if you haven't already, it's amazing and I can't do it justice by summarizing it here. In that post his narrative is that the 2008 crisis never ended, banks continued to abuse Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities (CMBS) as well as other forms of collateral, and then when the pandemic hit it was like a killing blow, these are [/u/Criand](https://www.reddit.com/u/Criand/) 's words:

> There is SO. MUCH. LEVERAGE. ABUSE. IN. THE. WORLD. All it takes is one fatal blow to bring it all down - and it sure as hell looks like COVID was that uppercut to send everything into a death spiral.

> When COVID hit, many people were left without jobs. Others had less pay from the jobs they kept. It rocked the financial world and it was so unexpected. Apartment residents would now become delinquent, causing the apartment complexes to become delinquent. Business owners would be hurting for cash to pay their mortgages as well due to lack of business. The subprime loans all started to become a really big issue.

-   Like I say please read his post in full if you get the chance. [BlackRock released their own analysis of the 2020 crash](https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/literature/whitepaper/viewpoint-lessons-from-covid-19-market-structure-november-2020.pdf) which is an interesting read. Page 7 of that talks about the US Treasury market and how foreign investors sold off $400 billion of US treasuries in March 2020. A big suspected cause of the 2020 crash is that the yield returns on UST bonds crashed, meaning the safe and secure government backed securities were now becoming worthless. That paper also talks about just [how important the US Treasury Bond market is](https://i.imgur.com/QXd7hPN.png). As you can see it's worth $18 trillion and it's the most liquid market on the planet, these bonds are also used by most large banks as collateral to meet liquidity requirements. This market ties *everything* together in the US financial system, so if this starts to hiccup then the ramifications are going to be big and extreme.

-   The 2020 crash was big but short lived, I now want to look at only the stock market aspect of the crash. Last year [these were the top Asset Management Firms](https://i.imgur.com/FwKGDuM.jpg), clearly BlackRock and Vanguard stood out with much larger AUM and [this is what all of their securities portfolios looked like](https://i.imgur.com/cIVOCMZ.jpg), so again BlackRock and Vanguard are clearly way on top, interestingly though Vanguard had a greater securities portfolio value than BlackRock. Straight away you can see that all companies dipped in Q1 2020, but it's most pronounced in BlackRock and Vanguard.

-   I'm not going to spend too long on this next point because frankly it's a bit stupid, but it's an idea that won't get out of my head. During the 2020 crash period, BlackRock's portfolio dropped by $525 billion (just over half a trillion) where $318.5 billion of that was caused by BlackRock reducing positions and Vanguard's total portfolio dropped by $630 billion where $404.7 billion of that was caused by them reducing position sizes. Now in the next quarter both BlackRock and Vanguard bought back into positions that they had previously reduced, BlackRock spent $166.7 billion buying back into the exact same positions they had previously reduced and Vanguard spent $189.39 billion buying back into previously reduced positions. I probably did a terrible job explaining that so [here's a shitty diagram](https://i.imgur.com/cjjeaIj.png) explaining what I mean.

-   Unfortunately you can't actually tell what price securities were bought for on 13F documents because all prices are based on averages at the end of the quarter, so it's entirely possible that BlackRock & Vanguard dropped securities that were losing money, where they sold high and bought low (this is the obvious answer). But (and please humor me here) what if they purposefully crashed the markets by selling off that $700 billion of stock and then quickly bought right back into them within 2 months? BlackRock and Vanguard dropping $700 billion of securities is no small thing, this would have caused a huge dip in the markets, triggering further panic selling. Remember BlackRock went into this crash without buying many puts, so their intention seems to have been to sell stock off rather than recoup value through puts, the latter option here would not have resulted in as big of a market crash. All evidence suggests the 2020 crash was caused by a slow build up of events, not sudden and abrupt massive bankruptcies like in 2008. Puts could have easily stopped BlackRock's portfolio value dropping too much, and yet their choice was to just sell off a load of stock affecting the whole market. [Don't worry I'm well aware of how I probably sound right now](https://i.imgur.com/lVlw9ej.png).

-   Anyway let's look now at what came about from the 2020 crash. One of the biggest things is that Leverage went through the roof as [seen in this diagram](https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/6084aa4c0904c0ac5a08c3f0/960x0.png?fit=scale) and [in this one](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/00-stock-market-leverage.png). [This article](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-11/why-fed-s-covid-break-for-banks-now-has-it-in-a-bind-quicktake) explains why companies were suddenly allowed to operate on massive margins (it's behind a paywall but I just copy & pasted it before it was blocked, I'll walk you through it anyway)

-   "After markets gyrated in March 2020, the U.S. Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars into a financial system rocked by the coronavirus pandemic. It also gave banks a one-year break from a rule called the supplementary leverage ratio (SLR)".

-   "What is the supplementary leverage ratio? - It's a standard developed by global bank regulators after the 2008 financial crisis. It requires banks to set aside more capital as their assets grow". More accurately the SLR rule changed temporarily to allow banks to exclude U.S. Treasuries from SLR calculations, this increased the capacity of banks to own Treasuries because they wouldn't have to put up more capital to do so, and that increased their cash flow so they could go back to spending, which should have helped the economy. I think we all know by now they did not use this rule change to help the economy.

-   Banks seem to have abused the ability to over-leverage themselves to make profit rather than help and support businesses during the pandemic. Articles like [this one](https://goldbroker.com/news/two-quadrillion-dollars-global-timebomb-2261) say "the notorious Deutsche Bank has outstanding derivatives of €37 trillion against total equity of €62 billion. Thus the derivatives position is 600X the equity." *Holy shit*, some of the big banks are 600x leveraged. That really is as insane as it sounds, that kind of leverage would be like buying a $240k house with only putting up a $400 down payment (I wish I could get those rates).

-   Banks clearly started abusing the ability to borrow (yet again) but something bugs me about this. Larry Fink is still apparently the Federal Reserve's go-to guy, he helped them out in the 2008 crash and apparently [articles like this show he was involved in the pandemic response](https://www.businessinsider.com/what-to-know-about-blackrock-larry-fink-biden-cabinet-facts-2020-12?r=US&IR=T): *"BlackRock had a significant role to play in the US government's coronavirus pandemic response. In March 2020, the Federal Reserve picked FMA, BlackRock's consulting arm, to handle an emergency asset-purchasing program. There was no process where other asset managers could have bid for the job, according to a Wall Street Journal report."*

-   I highly doubt Fink was only asked about an asset-purchasing program, I consider it highly likely Fink had a say in the SLR rule change too. But why would Fink allow a rule change that could lead to abuse of the markets with excessive risky lending? It's almost as if he wanted the banks to abuse this to add further fuel onto the fire.

-   I feel like we need a big recap to go over BlackRock's possible involvement in this situation so far: They made it easy for Shitadel to start shorting stock by accepting UST bonds as collateral, Shitadel owns Palafox Trading so they can pull UST bonds out of their ass apparently. BlackRock had held millions of GME for years but only sold in bulk at 2 points; when Gamestop wanted shares back for a stock buyback and when Ryan Cohen came along wanting to join the party, at both of these times BlackRock did not seem obligated to sell to either party so it seems they helped them out. Then the 2020 crash comes, BlackRock Leroy Jenkins'd themselves into that without buying puts to protect themselves from a crash, then they sold $ hundreds of billions worth of stock only to buy this exact same stock back weeks later, a consequence of the crash (that you could argue they helped cause) was that the SLR rule was eased up so banks could exclude UST bonds from their calculations meaning they could go hard on spending including on their existing short positions. Finally BlackRock did buy puts in Q1 2021 at the exact time Fidelity recalled a ton of heavily shorted stock, and from what BlackRock bought these puts in it seems they expected the MOASS to have gone off in Jan this year. I do understand a lot of this is conjecture but I'm really hoping you're starting to see some possible webs forming between BlackRock's actions and what's gone down so far.

-   If any of what I'm assuming is true, why the hell have BlackRock done all of this? It seems like they've purposefully enabled the market to get heavily shorted and yet also helped set Gamestop up to hurt short sellers. Did they want all of this to blow up? Most of us know that BlackRock has previously backed Ryan Cohen when he was setting up Chewy, so those 2 already have a connection. BlackRock selling millions of shares to RC when there were unlikely any on the market (other than phantom shares) seems to have been another time these 2 were connected. I'm going to make another assumption now and say that RC might just be another pawn by BlackRock in their game. Ryan Cohen jumping into Gamestop and buying 9 million shares was a risky move, last year Gamestop still had a bleak outlook, hence why so many people called DFV insane when he went hard into GME. The financials just weren't there, revenue was lower than ever due to the pandemic and it seemed George Sherman wasn't making any grand gestures to improve the company. Why would RC just swan in and spend around $100 million on a dying store? Yes he's a brilliant business man, but unless RC had an idea that the shorts were about to be hurt then I deem that to have been a risky move. If Larry Fink had let Gamestop get nearly destroyed by short sellers knowing that they could reverse their game at any point by recalling shares (just like Fidelity did) then passing this knowledge on to RC would give him the confidence to go so hard on Gamestop. Maybe Fink was even the one who passed the idea onto RC in the first place, where Fink wanted a successful young business man to swoop in and save a dying company, I mean he had seen RC in action with Chewy so he knew he would be perfect for this role. Yes RC could have done all of this by himself, but to me there's too many little hints BlackRock are involved and RC couldn't have even come onboard with his 9m shares if it wasn't for BlackRock. I'm well aware this might all be a bit too tinfoil for you, but remember [even Mulder was correct sometimes](https://i.imgur.com/Vua68HR.jpg).

-   I want to finish this section by looking at [this post](https://reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/mrstka/its_just_a_bug_bro_part_4_it_has_to_be_a_fucking/) made by user [/u/hell-mitc](https://www.reddit.com/u/hell-mitc/). That post shows how Larry Fink said "We never had any convos with our clients surrounding crypto, and we never had any convos regarding reddit and gamestop...but it is fun to watch...". [/u/hell-mitc](https://www.reddit.com/u/hell-mitc/) is understandably pissed off by this statement because [it seems BlackRock is not taking this issue seriously](https://i.imgur.com/xqSR3PV.jpg). But if we look at the same interview with the ideas I've covered in this post, then we can see now how Fink set the ultimate trap for the shorts; he made it easy to lend shares, he worked against them by selling shares to Gamestop and RC and then he helped give banks unlimited leverage to double down on short positions. Fink did nothing malicious himself and yet fully enabled the shorts to destroy themselves with their greed. In Fink's position I would consider it "fun to watch" too.

SUMMARY: The 2020 economic crash was massive but short lived, the 2008 crash lasted 1.5 years whereas the 2020 crash lasted 1.5 months. I speculated that BlackRock may have had a hand in causing the stock crash as they sold $ hundreds of billions of stock then bought right back into the same positions just weeks later. The outcome of the 2020 crash was that the SLR rule got changed allowing banks to exclude UST bonds from their SLR calculations, this should have helped the economy, bit instead it seems to have just helped them go harder on their short positions. I reiterated some points on how BlackRock might be involved in this saga and that RC might have been introduced by Fink to help start the Uno reverse part of the plan. Finally I looked at a user's post where Fink said the Gamestop saga was "fun to watch", and considering everything we've covered so far I can see how it would be fun to watch in Fink's position too. Now let's ask, why would Larry Fink want the markets to blow up? I have a theory and we'll look at that in the next section.

[Continued in Part 3](https://reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/ommgb0/blackrock_the_great_reset_part_3/)
