BlackRock CEO Larry Fink believes that people will come back to the office in a "big way" in 2023
Edward Clifton
SVP of Strategic Partnerships and Artificial Intelligence Strategy @ Pexip | Large Language Models (LLM), C-Level
In a recent interview with Bloomberg TV, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said that he believes people will come back to the office in a "big way" in 2023. He said that the office is a place where people can collaborate and learn from each other and that it is essential for building relationships and company culture.
There is an interesting trend that the same voices parroting the same messaging...
It is fair to say that Larry Fink's comments about people coming back to the office may be influenced by his position as CEO of BlackRock, the largest landlord in the world.
BlackRock has a significant investment in office space, and Fink's comments could be seen as an attempt to boost the value of that investment. Additionally, BlackRock's business model relies on employees being in the office in order to generate fees.
According to data from Blue Vault, there have been at least 38 real estate investment funds that have stopped redemptions or liquidations in the last two years. This includes some of the largest and most well-known funds in the industry:
According to a report by Preqin, a provider of financial data and intelligence, there is approximately 10% of corporate real estate funds are currently gated with limited ability to get your money out. As you can imagine the amount of money involved is immense.
The majority of this money is tied up in large, non-traded funds so it is very opaque.
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Economic damage
A good example of the potential damage this can do to the economic system can be illustrated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) investigating St James's Place Wealth Management (SJP) regarding real estate investments for a number of reasons.
First, the FCA is concerned about the liquidity of SJP's real estate funds. In 2022, SJP suspended redemptions in its SJP Property unit trust and deferred redemptions in its corresponding life and pension funds. This was due to a fall in demand for commercial property in the UK, which made it difficult for SJP to sell assets and generate cash to meet redemption requests.
Second, the FCA is concerned about the marketing of SJP's real estate funds. The FCA alleges that SJP misrepresented the risks associated with the funds and failed to adequately inform investors about the potential for liquidity problems.
Third, the FCA is concerned about the governance of SJP's real estate funds. The FCA alleges that SJP failed to properly oversee the funds and that there were conflicts of interest between SJP and the asset managers who ran the funds.
The FCA's investigation is ongoing, and it is not yet clear what the outcome will be. However, the investigation is a sign that the FCA is taking a close look at the real estate investment fund industry and is concerned about the risks that these funds pose to investors.
Does anybody get the feeling that people are not returning to the office?
CEO of nuVa Enterprises
1 年It is obvious, that knowledge workers, especially those in mid life with families do not wish to spend a quarter of the day commuting and exposing themselves to germs, stress and other travel risks. Therefore I think Mr. Fink, needs to Fink again (sorry..). Now all these knowledge workers are not using carrier pigeons to communicate in a hybrid fashion,?they are using telecommunications infrastructure, and visualised ‘big data’ to interpret the ‘truth of their world’ and their next responsive actions. Current desktop media are absolutely ‘first generation’, and do not understand social collaboration and thus constrain the knowledge flow between the remote parties. The closer the media emulate a natural face to face meeting meeting with relevant artifacts, the better the remote cognition and understanding. (and the less the need of face to face). This improved remote cognition delivers best innovation, knowledge flow, immediate decision making without travel, NetZero attainment, work life balance etc. This is the new revolutionary knowledge highway that is changing the world. (Gartner 2023, has one billion knowledge workers with 390 million working hybrid by this Christmas.)