By Ghost Zero

In March 2008, Bear Stearns was going under. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York put up the money to get JPMorgan to buy it, and took nearly $30 billion of Bear's worst mortgage assets into a new company called Maiden Lane LLC. Somebody had to manage that pile. The New York Fed picked BlackRock.

That September, AIG went down, and two more pools were created, Maiden Lane II and Maiden Lane III. BlackRock got those too. Its contracts, posted on the New York Fed's own website, spell out the pay. For Maiden Lane III alone: a one-time $2 million fee for "advisory, analytics, and structuring," then guaranteed minimum fees of $15 million the first year, $10 million the second and $7 million the third. Maiden Lane II added $1.5 million up front and minimums of $7 million, $5 million and $3 million.

Guaranteed minimums. However the assets did, the manager got paid.

Part 1 of this series showed how three firms became the biggest owners of nearly everything you buy. This part asks who the government calls when it gets in trouble. Over and over, the same names.

One Name on the Door

Maiden Lane was not the only job. The New York Fed's own list of crisis vendors names BlackRock on contracts for all three Maiden Lane companies, for collateral monitoring in the TALF loan program, for the Fed's mortgage-bond purchase program, and for advisory work on the government's backstop of Citigroup's bad assets.

Treasury got in on it too. In 2009 it paired taxpayer money with private money to buy troubled mortgage securities, and picked BlackRock as one of nine firms to run the funds. By Treasury's own report, the BlackRock fund returned 93.9 percent.

According to the Congressional Oversight Panel, Maiden Lane III was the vehicle that paid off AIG's trading partners, banks like Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank. BlackRock was the hired hand running the cleanup, collecting fees on the way.

2020: Same Phone Number

In March 2020, as COVID crashed the markets, the Fed announced it would buy corporate bonds for the first time in its history, through a program called the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility. It would also buy bond funds that trade on the stock market, called ETFs.

The manager: BlackRock. The custodian and administrator: State Street. The same month, the New York Fed also hired BlackRock to buy commercial mortgage bonds for it.

The bond funds the Fed bought included BlackRock's own iShares funds. In the first week of buying, May 12 to 19, seven iShares funds made up 48 percent of the Fed's $1.3 billion in ETF purchases, according to the research firm ETFGI. By the end of 2020, the program held $8.8 billion in ETFs and $5.5 billion in corporate bonds.

BlackRock agreed to charge no management fee on the ETFs and to credit back the fees it earned on its own iShares funds. That is true.

But look at the bigger number. The program was set up to support up to $750 billion. It actually bought about $14 billion. The announcement did most of the work. Investors who heard the Fed was coming poured into the same corporate bond funds before the Fed spent a dime. My view, and I am labeling it as my view: a fee waiver costs very little when your name is on the product the central bank just told the whole market to buy.

In 2023, the Fed's inspector general reviewed the BlackRock contract after public criticism and concluded that established processes "reduced risks." That is the Fed's own watchdog grading the Fed's own contract.

The Revolving Door

Contracts are one half. People are the other.

Brian Deese worked in the Obama White House as a senior adviser and deputy budget director. He went to BlackRock, where by 2018 he was Head of Sustainable Investing. In 2021 he became President Biden's top economic adviser, director of the National Economic Council.

Wally Adeyemo served in the Obama administration, then joined BlackRock in 2017 as a senior adviser and interim chief of staff to CEO Larry Fink. In March 2021, the Senate confirmed him as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.

Mike Pyle spent 2014 to 2021 at BlackRock, rising to Global Chief Investment Strategist, then went to the White House as chief economic adviser to Vice President Harris and later a deputy national security advisor. In 2024, he went back to BlackRock.

Stanley Fischer was Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve until he resigned in October 2017. In February 2019, BlackRock hired him as a senior adviser.

Before anyone makes this about one party, look at the dates. The 2008 contracts and the 2020 bond program came under Republican presidents. The 2021 appointments came under a Democrat. The party in charge changed every time. The contractor did not.

Overseas, Too

This is not just an American habit.

In 2014, the European Central Bank hired BlackRock Solutions to advise it on designing a program to buy asset-backed securities. Asked by a European lawmaker how BlackRock got the job, ECB President Mario Draghi wrote that the contract was awarded through "a competitive negotiated procedure without publication of a notice." In plain English, the job was never publicly posted, so no other firm had the chance to bid on it.

In 2020, the European Commission hired BlackRock to study how environmental, social and governance rules should be built into banking regulation. The world's largest money manager, with money in those same banks, was hired to help shape the rules for them. The European Ombudsman looked into it and said the Commission "should have been more rigorous" in checking for conflicts of interest. She added that BlackRock's low bid "could be perceived as part of a strategy" to gain influence over the rules. Then she ruled that the Commission had done nothing improper, and the contract stood.

A watchdog that describes the problem and then lets it stand is not much of a watchdog.

Too Big to Fail, Never Too Big to Watch

After 2008, Congress created the Financial Stability Oversight Council to label firms so big that their failure could take down the system. Those firms get extra supervision from the Fed. The council's own list of past designations names AIG, GE Capital, Prudential and MetLife. BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are not on it.

Firms trusted to manage the rescue every time the system breaks, holding about $32.5 trillion between them, have never been put under the extra oversight given to an insurance company.

And the government keeps handing them more. BlackRock and State Street manage the stock and bond index funds in the Thrift Savings Plan, the retirement plan for federal workers and members of the military. As of May 2026, the plan held about $1.16 trillion. The soldier at Fort Bragg and the clerk at the Social Security office are saving for retirement through the same firms that run the bailouts.

What You Can Do

You cannot fire the government's contractor. You can make the hiring harder to hide.

– If you are a federal worker or service member, your Thrift Savings Plan index funds are managed by BlackRock and State Street. Write to the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board and ask how the shares in your account are voted.
– Call your representatives and ask them to require that every emergency contract signed by the Fed or the Treasury be put out for open bidding, and that the full contract, fees included, be published within 30 days.
– Ask them to back a real cooling-off period: no one who hires or regulates a firm can go to work for it for five years, and no one from that firm can take a seat overseeing it for five years.
– Read the contracts yourself. The Evidence Record links them on this page.

Start today. Find out who manages the default fund in your retirement plan, then search that name along with "Federal Reserve contract."

The full research is in The Big Three's Shadow Empire: How BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Rule the World, free in the Red Pill Library. Part 1 of Three Names on Everything, The Owners You Never Voted For, covers how three firms became the biggest shareholders in nearly every company you buy from. I also put this subject into song form, released by Vigilant Protocol as SHADOW EMPIRE, with songs from the other projects on the way. Protocol Media is building an archive for every topic it covers: books, briefs, music, art and short-form video, backed by the Evidence, Founding and Acts Records. The work is underway and the documents are still being added, so the page keeps growing.

ART AS THE WEAPON. TRUTH AS THE AMMUNITION.