Larry Finks take on the Middle East crisis is at odds with doom-and-gloom mainstream media

Larry Fink’s BlackRock posted blow-out earnings this week – and you can thank the business it’s doing in the war-torn Middle East, On The Money has learned.That may sound hard to swallow if you read the economic doom-and-gloom that is portrayed everywhere in the mainstream media over the Iran conflict.Soaring oil prices, inflation and relentless pessimism are headlines you can expect on any given day.And to be sure, there are real financial questions dogging the Persian Gulf.

War aside, Saudi Arabia’s $1.5 trillion Public Investment Fund is showing strains from spending plans including something called “The Line,” a futuristic, miles-long, glass-and-steel mega-development that could cost up to $1 trillion by the time it’s completed – supposedly sometime after 2030.It’s one reason the Saudi’s announced that they are mothballing their nascent golf league, LIV Golf, which never mounted a competitive threat to US PGA four years after its launch.“That was an easy one to kill,” said one observer.

“It’s not like they don’t have other priorities.”Yet despite the headline-grabbing hiccups and the missiles and the drones, for places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE’s Abu Dhabi, it’s mostly business as usual, my sources tell me.We reported this a couple of weeks ago – and it was confirmed by Fink in his first quarter earnings calls with Wall Street analysts.Fink doesn’t see the LIV detour as existential to the region’s long-term business prospects.

The voluble CEO of the world’s largest money manager, with $14 trillion in assets, has an eye on every market, and in every region in the world, and he sees green in the desert.Yet his comments about the staying power of the Middle Eastern economy on Tuesday were overlooked by much of the mainstream media – maybe because they don’t fit in with its narrative.Wall Street trading desks, which have their own information gathering systems, can’t afford to look away from what is reall...