In a tiny
town in the Far North-West of the United States called East
Wenatchee, a giant computer whose job was to make the future
predictable was built. The man building it was a banker called Larry
Fink.
Back in
1986, Mr. Fink's career had collapsed. He lost 100 million dollars in
a deal and had been sacked. He became determined it wouldn't happen
again. Fink started a company called BlackRock and built a computer
he called Aladdin.
It is housed
in a series of large sheds in the apple orchards outside Wenatchee.
Fink’s aim
was to use the computer to predict, with certainty, what the risk of
any deal or investment was going to be. The computer constantly
monitors the world and it takes things that it sees happening, and
then, compares them to events in the past.
It can do
this because it has, in its memory, a vast history of the past 50
years. Not just financial, but all kinds of events. Out of the
millions and millions of correlations, the computer then spots
possible disasters, possible dangers lying in the future and moves
the investments to avoid any radical change and keep the system
stable.
Aladdin has
proved to be incredibly successful. The assets it guides and controls
now amount to 15 trillion dollars, which is 7% of the world’s total
wealth.
From
the documentary
HyperNormalisation
by
Adam
Curtis
***
Well,
actually, Aladdin's job is not to keep the system stable, as Adam
Curtis says. Otherwise, it could somehow prevent the big financial
crisis of 2007-08. Aladdin's job is only to predict events in order
to protect and enlarge the investments and earnings of BlackRock's
major shareholders and clients. This is the main reason for which
Aladdin has proved to be incredibly successful.
Just note
that due to its power, BlackRock has been called the world's largest shadow bank.
Comments
Post a Comment