At BlackRock, a Wall Street rock star makes US$5 trillion comeback

Los Angeles

LAURENCE Fink, the leader and founder of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, had come home.

A Bruin to the bone - Class of 1974 - he had a story to tell the 5,000 graduates packed into the cavernous basketball arena at the University of California, Los Angeles. Once upon a time he was a rock star on Wall Street. He had big hair and flashed turquoise jewellery, and making money had never seemed so easy.

Until it wasn't.

"I screwed up," Mr Fink declared, recalling the US$100 million he blew thanks to failed mortgage trades in 1986. "And it was bad."

For the graduating millennials, the morality tale resonated not least because it came from a UCLA grad who had ascended, fallen from and again scaled Wall Street's treacherous peaks. But it was his description of why he stumbled that truly explained his evolut…