The world’s largest asset manager and a leading investment index provider are facing congressional probes for allegedly facilitating the flow of U.S. dollars into Chinese companies that the United States has deemed to be fueling China’s military or the regime’s human rights abuses.
In letters dated July 31 to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and MSCI head Henry Fernandez, the U.S. House’s China Select Committee stated that a brief review of MSCI indexes and BlackRock funds showed that the two companies together have directed investments to more than 60 Chinese entities already on the U.S. blacklist.
As a “direct result” of BlackRock’s and MSCI’s decisions, Americans who invested savings in their funds are now “unwittingly funding” Chinese companies that build weapons for the Chinese military known as the People’s Liberation Army, giving a hand to “the CCP’s stated mission of technological supremacy,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), the committee’s chairman, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the ranking Democrat, wrote.
“It is unconscionable for any U.S. company to profit from investments that fuel the military advancement of America’s foremost foreign adversary and facilitate human rights abuses,” the lawmakers wrote, adding that the “massive flows of American capital” to these entities are “exacerbating an already significant national security threat and undermining American values.”
In the case of BlackRock, across five funds alone, the asset manager has invested more than $429 million in flagged Chinese firms, while nearly 5 percent of the MSCI China A Index is pegged to blacklisted entities. Such numbers, the lawmakers suspect, are only the tip of the iceberg.
The probe makes up part of the committee’s ongoing investigation into U.S. investments in China, which, in July, included venture capital firms that have invested in China-based artificial intelligence, semiconductor, and quantum companies.
A tough stance on China is one of the few issues that garner support from both political sides in the deeply divided Congress. The bipartisan House panel, formed in January, makes policy recommendations and has subpoena power, which Mr. Gallagher has said he would use if executives fail to cooperate with the committee probes.
“Both Democrats and Republicans can agree that we should not be funding PLA military modernization, supporting the CCP’s techno-totalitarian surveillance state, nor the CCP’s gross human rights abuses,” a source close to the committee told The Epoch Times.
MSCI has more than $13 trillion benchmarked to its products, making it one of the largest index providers globally. BlackRock oversees more than $9 trillion in assets, and is responsible to millions of U.S. investors who depend on its services for their future retirement.
BlackRock told The Epoch Times in a statement that it “complies with all applicable U.S. government laws” with “all investments in China and markets around the world,” and will continue to engage with the committee on the issues raised.
“Like many global asset managers, BlackRock offers our clients a number of strategies to invest in or exclude China from their portfolios. The majority of our clients’ investments in China are through index funds, and we are one of 16 asset managers currently offering U.S. index funds investing in Chinese companies,” a company spokesperson said.
MSCI, similarly, said it’s reviewing the request for information from the lawmakers.
“MSCI indexes measure the performance of equity markets available to international investors, and comply with all applicable U.S. laws. MSCI does not manage or recommend or facilitate investments in any country,” an MSCI spokesperson told The Epoch Times.
The Chinese entities on MSCI indexes include state-owned aerospace firm Aviation Industry Corp. China, which makes aircraft for the Chinese military; BGI Genomics, a military-linked Chinese genetics giant that the United States has found complicit in supporting forced labor; and ZTE, whose telecom equipment the United States banned last year, citing national security risks.
BlackRock, meanwhile, has funded a major subsidiary of China General Nuclear Power Group that the U.S. authorities accused of stealing U.S. nuclear technology, as well as that of China North Industries Group Co., producer of artillery shells and munitions for the Chinese military.
The lawmakers said they want to see a list of all the companies on MSCI indexes, as well as the thinking behind their inclusion, policies, and guidance documents relating to conflicts of interest that BlackRock has applied when engaging with China-linked entities, and details of U.S. investor exposure.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Of course, that is the way the system is set up and constructed!
“Americans who invested savings in their funds are now “ ̶u̶n̶w̶i̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶l̶y̶ knowingly funding” Chinese companies that build weapons for the Chinese military . . .”
All investment — including MAJOR tax write-offs, funds it! When VP Joe Biden signed the MOU, or Memorandum of Understanding, with Xi Jinping, it was so that sketchy Chicom corporations could list on Wall Street with NO VETTING or standard auditing —- mystery communist corporations?!
Why??? Because Chicom companies do not sell stock shares —- illegal to sell to non–commies and foreigners, according to their laws and constitution! So it is VIEs offshore, or Variable Interest Entities, which are units of interest in the shares —- NOT the shares themselves, which can be closed overnight with tremendous losses —- all handled via offshore hedge funds. This took place several years ago with JPMorgan Chase and some other banks losing over $10 billion —- so what, they just take a major tax write-off, so those funds went to tne CCP, the Amercan tax base recapitalizes the banks, so the AMERICAN TAX BASE indirectly funds China’s military, their PLA (really directly, of course)!
The Private Equity/LBO standard model —— using, really depleting, the tax base for mass profit —— why the national debt correlates on a one—to—one basis with American billionaires —— they aren’t creating wealth, they are depleting it as it is shifted elsewhere! Each time a job is offshored, the American tax base is being dismantled, ditto for all such VIEs (and other) investments!
(In actuality, China owes American bondholders far more than the American gov’t owes China (see Andrew Hale’s articles at Heritage Foundation site)!)
Companies never lose $$$$$ — they make a fortune from tax write‐offs and tax breaks —- the tax structure purposely designed so! When Bill Gates, Sr., shyster father of Bill Gates, urged for changes in “inheritance tax” laws, the dude wasn’t beimg benevolent, it was to churn more business for the family law firms (two or three existed at that time), as they will then create new machinations (like thst GRAT) to get around new tax laws! Difficult or abstract to grasp, but THAT is the way they roll!
Bill Gates’ Gates Foundation is actually a subset of this overall design: really structured as a super—investment firm/financial influencer! First his Cascade Investments, or using another financial entity, he invests in the stocks and bonds of targeted corporations —– next his Gates Foundation “donates” to the corporation which is legal when the company states it is involved in a “charitable process” of some kind (???), either driving up the value of his existing shares and bonds, and/or he is part or full owner of the corporation so he is actually investing in it —- his “donation” constitutes a tax write–off, so a double or triple payout to Gates. (Sometimes a simple straight‐out investment: investing $50 million in Pfizer and cashing out $500 million later, but assured to happen as his Gates Foundation pays the salaries of 20 to 30 senior managers at the WHO, insuring the Pfizer spikevax will be promoted by them, etc. (He pays the salaries of senior types at the WHO, World Bank and elsewhere through a process known as SECONDMENTS!)
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Have enjoyed Ms. Fu’s articles in The Epoch Times frequently over the years!