Laurence D. Fink, BlackRock CEO, said he supports the re-election of Barack Obama because the president needs more than four years to help the country recover from the global financial crisis.
Mr. Obama became president at the time of “the worst financial crisis in our lifetimes,” Mr. Fink in an interview Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” “And the fix is not four years. The fix is going to be longer than that, and so I support President Obama, and I believe he is the right man for the next four years.”
Mr. Fink’s comments mirror the quarterly Bloomberg Global Poll, which this week showed global investors increasingly prefer Mr. Obama to presumed Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Asked who would be the better leader for the global economy, 49% favor Mr. Obama against 38% for Mr. Romney, according to the poll. In January, the two candidates tied on the question.
“On the other hand, I would say very clearly, you need to create that engine of growth,” Mr. Fink said. “We need to make sure that those CEOs feel comfortable, not to buy back their shares, but to invest in that factory and create those jobs and those jobs create other jobs, and we have the multiplier effect for new jobs.”
Mr. Fink contributed to Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Still, he has been critical of some of Mr. Obama’s views. In 2009, he expressed concerns about the unintended consequences of Mr. Obama’s health-care proposals.
“I do believe we are going to have job destructions if the health-care bill happens. That is because once again it aggravates the state and local governments’ financing because a lot of the burden on health care is going to fall onto the states and they already have deficits,” Mr. Fink said at a Bank of America Merrill Lynch banking and financial services conference in New York in November 2009.
In September 2009, he said Mr. Obama’s programs to help homeowners stave off foreclosure might hinder the recovery of the mortgage market while benefiting banks that own second loans on the properties. Last year, he urged Mr. Obama to commit to reducing the U.S. deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years, calling Standard & Poor’s decision to cut its outlook on U.S. debt part of “a bad trend.”
