MW BlackRock's Larry Fink compares current climate of anxiety and uncertainty to 2008 financial crisis

By Steve Gelsi

Head of world's biggest asset manager says all current client conversations are dominated by worry about market swings

BlackRock Inc.'s Chief Executive Larry Fink said Friday conversations with clients are now "dominated by uncertainty and anxiety about markets and the economy" in the wake of huge swings in stock prices around President Trump's tariffs.

Fink, head of the world's biggest asset manager, compared the current time to the big moves in the stock market when inflation surged in 2022, and when equity prices slumped during the earlier days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09.

"We've seen periods like this before when there were large, structural shifts in policy and markets," Fink said. "We always stayed connected withclients, and some of BlackRock's biggest leaps in growth followed."

Fink's prepared statements came as BlackRock $(BLK)$ said its first-quarter profit fell 4% to $1.51 billion, or $9.64 a share, from $1.57 billion, or $10.48 a share, in the year-ago quarter,

BlackRock's adjusted profit of $11.30 a share was ahead of the FactSet consensus estimate of $10.08 a share.

BlackRock's first-quarter revenue rose to $5.28 billion from $4.73 billion in the year-ago quarter and came in slightly short of the analyst estimate of $5.29 billion.

BlackRock's stock was up 0.4% in premarket trading on Friday. The stock has fallen 16.2% so far in 2025 as of Thursday's closing bell. The S&P 500 SPX is down 10.4% so far in 2025.

-Steve Gelsi

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April 11, 2025 06:32 ET (10:32 GMT)

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