#29J Support the Show 7 Days a Week 9PM Free Speech Lives
#29J Support the Show 7 Days a Week 9PM Free Speech Lives
https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry-fink-annual-chairmans-letter
Every stock, every bond, every fund—every asset—can be tokenized. If they are, it will revolutionize investing.
Perhaps most importantly, tokenization makes investing much more democratic.
It can democratize access. Tokenization allows for fractional ownership. That means assets could be sliced into infinitely small pieces. This lowers one of the barriers to investing in valuable, previously inaccessible assets like private real estate and private equity.
It can democratize shareholder voting. When you own a stock, you have a right to vote on the company’s shareholder proposals. Tokenization makes that easier because your ownership and voting rights are digitally tracked, allowing you to vote seamlessly and securely from anywhere.
It can democratize yield. Some investments produce much higher returns than others, but only big investors can get into them. One reason? Friction. Legal, operational, bureaucratic. Tokenization strips that away, allowing more people access to potentially higher returns.
One day, I expect tokenized funds will become as familiar to investors as ETFs—provided we crack one critical problem: identity verification.
Financial transactions demand rigorous identity checks. Apple Pay and credit cards handle identity verification effortlessly, billions of times a day. Trade venues like NYSE and MarketAxess manage to do the same for buying and selling securities. But tokenized assets won’t run through those traditional channels, meaning we need a new digital identity verification system. It sounds complex, but India, the world’s most populous country, has already done it. Today, over 90% of Indians can securely verify transactions directly from their smartphones.60
The takeaway is clear. If we’re serious about building an efficient and accessible financial system, championing tokenization alone won’t suffice. We must solve digital verification, too.
Something worth expanding
In 1761, about 80 years after Jonathan’s Coffee House became the heartbeat of London’s financial life, a group of 150 wealthy traders tried to close the gates.
They offered Jonathan’s owner £1,200 per year—about 10 years of wages for the average worker—for exclusive use of the space during key trading hours. In essence, they wanted to create a private market.
But London’s broader community of investors wasn’t having it. They protested, they argued their case in the courts, and after two years, they won. The markets had to remain open. Everybody could invest.61
From our vantage point today, the history of finance can look like a long, steady march toward greater democracy—more investors, broader participation, and expanded prosperity. And to a large extent, that’s been the case. But this democratization was never guaranteed. It still isn’t.
Markets don’t naturally evolve to serve everyone equally. They require relentless effort, conscious choices, and constant vigilance—from those coffee-house protests centuries ago to today’s complex debates over retirement policy, tokenization, infrastructure investment, and artificial intelligence.
It’s demanding work, but at BlackRock we’ve been doing it for 37 years as fiduciaries to our clients. And not a single day has passed when it hasn’t felt worth every bit of effort. Because no system human beings have ever devised has done more to generate wealth for more people than the capital markets.
People invest their savings—whether it’s 50 guilders or $50,000—and those investments become roads and schools, businesses and breakthrough technologies—the things that power our economies, sending wealth rippling back to millions, allowing them to worry less about kitchen-table finances and spend more time simply enjoying life with their families.
I’ve always said investing is an act of hope—that no one invests for the long term unless they believe the future will be better than the present. But that’s not quite right. Investing isn’t just an act of hope; investing is what makes our hopes, our reality.
That’s something worth protecting.
That’s something worth expanding.
That’s something worth democratizing.
