The Ole Corporate Blame Game, Redux

09 Sep The Ole Corporate Blame Game, Redux

Have you figured it out yet? Whatever economic 💩 storm be a’brewing, it’s YOUR fault.

Somehow, it’s not the fault of:

• The state
• Crony capitalism
• Greedy corporations
• Unscrupulous business practices
• Junk loans

Noooooo way. It’s YOUR fault, peons and plebs.

–https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2022/09/02/the-ole-corporate-blame-game/

Yeeeppppp. And here we go again. More of the old corporate blame game.

“BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink said Tuesday that large government spending programs, the reduced immigration, and the proliferation of remote working are contributing to inflation. That, in turn, is causing the Federal Reserve to be more aggressive and increasing the risk of a hard landing.”
–https://seekingalpha.com/news/3880625-blackrocks-larry-fink-says-government-spending-remote-work-fuel-inflation

I don’t disagree that the government printing money as though it seemingly has no consequence = inflation. But why does he care so much about reduced immigration and remote work? What’s the deal here?

“Besides the government spending, fewer legal immigrants are entering the country. ‘We are down approximately 2.5M legal immigrants from the rate prior to 2017 of how many illegal immigrants were allowed,’ he said.

Productivity has dropped, too, which he blames on the amount of remote work since the pandemic. (Q2 productivity, unit labor costs were revised up slightly last week.) As a result, BlackRock is ‘going to ask our employees to be much more mindful about their responsibilities in the office. We’re going to be taking a harder line as to how do we bring our employees back. And we believe this is going to be a key element in bringing down inflation, rising in productivity.’

Bringing people back into the office and stabilizing productivity ‘could be a great offset, and that could make the Federal Reserve’s job to be a little less difficult, and it then may lead to a less aggressive Fed,’ Fink said.”
-from the same article

Riiiiiiiight.

What kinds of jobs is he planning to offer to the legal immigrants? I’d like to know.

Also: simply tossing out a claim that remote work has driven up inflation doesn’t make it so. Likewise, tossing out the claim that remote work hinders productivity doesn’t make it so.

This is like another verse of the same song we heard from The Washington Post:

“The Washington Post is on track to lose money this year after a business slowdown. This could be explained by declining readership in the post-Trump era, an industrywide move away from print journalism (and the ad sales therein), or the company’s lack of a diversified portfolio, the New York Times reported. But the paper’s publisher and CEO, Fred Ryan, has a different theory: Not enough workers are coming into the office. Ryan, whom Jeff Bezos hand-selected to run the paper when he purchased it in 2013, has been narrowly focused on productivity and office attendance—and the relationship between the two—since the pandemic hit, sources told the Times. He’s been monitoring how many staff members come into the downtown D.C. office, even requesting records for video calls to measure productivity, finding that they were rarely held on Fridays. He’s reportedly incensed that some workers aren’t abiding by the company’s three-days-per-week in-office policy, sources say, telling members of his leadership team there’s not enough productivity among ‘numerous low performers’ in the newsroom ‘who needed to be managed out.'” (emphasis mine)
–https://fortune.com/2022/09/01/washington-post-ceo-fred-ryan-blames-remote-work-poor-performance/

As an interesting and I’m sure totally unrelated aside, BlackRock has its finger in the corporate real estate pie. (https://www.blackrock.com/institutions/en-us/strategies/alternatives/real-assets)

One of the commenters writes:

IMO, a lot of these companies want to “play boss again” and bring the peons back to the office. It’s not about productivity, it’s about surveillance and obedience. Sit down in the cube and do what you’re told without question! And if you don’t, we will try to find people we can exploit by offering them low pay in the cube farm.

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