Good Day at BlackRock

The Economist is unhappy about BlackRock in a cover story.  The cover cartoon shows an enormous jet black Rock-of-Gibraltar leaning over the two lane road ahead, threatening to topple and block all traffic forever.  BlackRock is a Wall St brokerage house, that buys and sells stock for its clients.  It was founded in the '80s and has done pretty well, it has $4 trillion in assets.  Part of BlackRock's success is a computer back office that tracks stocks and has made some canny predictions.  It was canny enough to keep BlackRock out of the mortgage backed security black hole back in 2006.  In fact it was so good that BlackRock now leases access to the system, bringing in $400 million in fees per year.  The system, dubbed Aladdin, is so popular on the street that the Economist reckons that another $11 trillion in stocks is controlled by Aladdin, giving a grand total of $15 trillion under the influence, or perhaps control, of this one piece of software.  That's quite a chunk of change, the entire US economy is about that size.
   This concentration clearly bothers the Economist.  If they had a say in the matter, they would put BlackRock under strict government regulation, lest they hiccup and crash the stock market.  Good thing the Economist isn't in charge.