BlackRock Joins the Full Court Press on Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is being subject to a full court press designed to pull them out of the BRICS and realign them with London and Washington. At the same time that U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken was in Saudi Arabia this week to work on the “normalization of relations” between Israel and Saudi Arabia—i.e., for the Saudis to recognize Israel in exchange for a military pact with the U.S.—Larry Fink and other top executives of BlackRock were there, too, to sign a deal with the Saudi government to launch BlackRock Riyadh Investment Management. The new entity, the BRIM, will be a new “multi-class investment firm” in Riyadh, with $5 billion in Saudi seed capital, to “manage funds that invest primarily in Saudi Arabia but also the rest of the Middle East and North Africa,” Financial Times reported. “The goal is to attract additional overseas capital to Saudi Arabia and deepen its capital markets through a range of investment funds managed by BlackRock,” which has a cool $10.5 trillion under management.