The fallacy of Vanguard and BlackRock reigning over the western world (please read description)

I love Mislav Kolakušić and many others, such as Ivor Cummins. These people are doing us a huge service. However, when they point to companies like Vanguard allegedly controlling the whole world, there is one essential point they're missing which invalidates their point.

Before you read on, you should know that this description has been written by Frank Ploegman. If you look at for instance my Rumble channel, you can see a long and consistent paper trail showing that I am extremely outspoken and critical of everything happening in the 'pandemic'. What is not well known, is that I have also been involved in investing in the financial markets for after 25 years, and have spent many thousands of
hours seriously studying this subject. I consider myself more than qualified to say something about investing.

If John Doe holds stock in a company, his name is recorded as the owner of this stock. However, his name is not made public due to privacy reasons, unless he holds more than, say, 5% or 10% of that company's publicly traded stock. There are other exceptions, such as when he is an insider or law maker.

If an investor wants to own a diversified portfolio, it is both very expensive and time-consuming to invest in, say, 500 individual stocks (or bonds) through 500 separate buy orders. Instead, it is much more practical to invest in a diversified fund.

As a comparison, it can be much more practical to just buy one ready-made fruit basket than to construct one yourself by buying a few of each individual fruit.

Index funds are a special class of funds and are one of the cheapest and best tools to invest long-term. An example is a fund that mirrors for instance the Standard and Poors 500 index (S&P 500), which is composed of stock of the 500 largest companies in the United States.

Now comes the crucial point: if Jane Doe invests through a fund provider such as Vanguard, BlackRock, or State Street, the 👉fund provider👈 is recorded as the 'owner' of the stock, NOT Jane. So it SEEMS like Vanguard is the owner of all these hundreds of individual stock, but they're just an intermediate. They are the MANAGER of the portfolio, not the OWNER (which is Jane Doe).

Because (exchange traded) funds are so popular, it seems that Vanguard et al. are the majority owners of basically all companies in the world. (This is the "ownership structure" that Kolakušić mentions.) In reality, the owners are for instance pension funds and tens of millions of John/Jane Does using Vanguard's service. Vanguard only combines individual fruits into fruit baskets.

So the claim by Kolakušić, "All this indicates that there is only a couple or maybe even just one person behind the whole story", is false. Instead, there are tens of millions John/Jane Does and hundreds of millions of (future) pensioners "behind the whole story".

Kolakušić may be right when he says that Vanguard et al. 'own' the majority of Big Pharma and all companies profiting by the 'pandemic', but they also 'own' the majority of all other companies in the world, including the ones that are incredibly harmed by the 'pandemic' such as cruise lines and airlines, the hospitality industry, and many others.

Index funds generally don't involve themselves in any company's decision making. To keep costs down to a bare minimum, they don't even have (human) fund managers. It's just an algorithm. If Apple is 1% of the entire market capitalization of all S&P 500 companies combined, the fund will simply invest 1% of all its investor's capital in Apple stocks.

I'm not saying that companies like BlackRock may not have (a lot of) influence behind the scenes, but for all those trillions, they should be viewed as INTERMEDIATES, not as owners/controllers.

In contrast to the above, I am in total agreement that the majority of the media is controlled by only a few companies, whose main priorities are profit, power and propaganda, NOT to report full and unbiased facts. See for instance:
https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/

SOURCE: https://rumble.com/v187a9p-unlimited-capital-blackrock-and-vanguard-reign-over-the-western-world.html