Description
Financial markets have long been viewed as operating with a binary opposition between public and private financial markets. Increasingly, public financial markets are dominated by asset managers that are tracking (public) market indices like the FTSE 100. At the same time, asset managers are increasingly owning and investing in assets in private markets like housing and infrastructure directly. We argue that the binary between public and private markets is being eroded. The issue is not that BlackRock operates in both public and private markets, but their efforts to remove the distinction between them. To do that, we analyse the case of BlackRock’s takeover of Preqin, a leading provider of data on private markets such as private equity and private credit. We argue this works to unify markets in two directions. The first is the way that markets are thought about with the integration of public and private forms of market data. The second is the unification of how the market is embodied in investment practices and products, such as BlackRock’s Aladdin system. We argue that this is one of the first steps in the integration of public and private financial markets which can shape the distribution of capital in the future.
