Economics
BlackRock to open a Saudi investment firm with $5 billion from PIF
The BlackRock logo is displayed at the company’s headquarters in New York City on Nov. 14, 2022.
Leonardo Munoz | Getty Images
Asset manager BlackRock will launch an investment platform in Riyadh with the help of a $5 billion anchor investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund.
The announcement Tuesday followed the signing of a memorandum of understanding between BlackRock’s Saudi division and the PIF with the aim of spurring capital markets growth in the oil-rich Gulf country.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $10 trillion in assets under management, will “launch investment strategies across asset classes for the Saudi market, including both public and private markets, managed by a Riyadh-based investment team,” a joint press release from the firm and the PIF read.
The new platform will be called BlackRock Riyadh Investment Management, or BRIM.
BRIM aims to help bring foreign institutional investment into Saudi Arabia as well as develop the Saudi asset management industry, expand local capital markets and investor diversification, and support the development of the kingdom’s asset management talent, the release said.
The initiative, as well as many others by the PIF, which oversees $925 billion in assets under management, contributes to Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, a multitrillion-dollar project aiming to modernize the kingdom’s economy and diversify it away from oil. Central to that effort is bringing major international institutions, investment and foreign talent into Saudi Arabia itself.
The establishment of BRIM aims to foster “further growth in the Saudi capital market ecosystem and enable a growing international investment management sector based in Saudi Arabia,” the press statement said.
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said in the statement that the kingdom “has become an increasingly attractive destination for international investment as Vision 2030 comes to life.”
The asset managing giant has been doing work with Saudi Arabia for years, and in 2018 made clear it would not pull out despite major controversy over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents.
In another move increasing its ties to the kingdom, BlackRock in July 2023 gave Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser a seat on its board of directors. Aramco is the largest oil company in the world.
At the time, BlackRock said the move reflected the firm’s emphasis on the Middle East as part of its long-term strategy.
— CNBC’s Yun Li contributed to this report.
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.
Carlos Jasso | Afp | Getty Images
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.
“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.
“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.
That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.
“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”
“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”
In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.
The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.
Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.
“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.
“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”
“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.
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