Regulators are beginning to look at the impact, not of assets gone sour, but of the sheer volume of trades one institution makes.

Regulators want not merely to prevent a repeat of the last blow-up but also to identify the sources of future systemic perils, BlackRock investment managers raises a subtle issue concerning not the ownership of assets but the way buying and selling decisions are made. The $US15 trillion of assets managed on its Aladdin platform amount to around 7% of all the shares, bonds and loans in the world. As a result, those who oversee many of the world’s biggest pools of money are looking at the financial world, at least in part, through a lens crafted by BlackRock. Some 17,000 traders in banks, insurance companies, sovereign-wealth funds and others rely in part on BlackRock’s analytical models to guide their investing. A dangerous skew?

The Economist reports:  Black Rock Rocks the Financial World