BlackRock, Others Buy Into Formula One

By Retracement:Private equity firm CVC Capital (CVC) has sold a $1.6 billion (1.0 billion pounds) stake in 'Formula One' to three investors including BlackRock (BLK) ahead of the motor racing company's planned $3 billion IPO in Singapore.

OSLO (Reuters) - In May 2012 the world's largest sovereign wealth fund joined U.S. investors BlackRock and Waddell & Reed to buy a $1.6 billion stake in motor racing's Formula One.

Having learned last week that the world's central banks are their sovereign wealth proxies have secretly pumped over $29 trillion into markets in the last few years, it is not entirely surprising to hear from one of the largest - Norway $888 billion oil fund - that it is buying stocks with bond hands and feet.

By CFA Institute Contributors: By Lauren Foster

The governor of Norway’s central bank says western Europe’s biggest oil producer is facing a major economic slowdown as crude prices continue to plunge. As Bloomberg reports, Oeystein Olsen said today in an interview after a press conference in Oslo, "our job now is that we need to prevent a severe downturn in the economy... that is presently the major concern of the board."

Last spring, the Norwegian government announced that it would use its $818 billion sovereign wealth fund to do more than simply invest the country’s oil money. From this point forth, said the owners of the world’s largest such fund, it would effectively function as an activist investor, with a mandate to advance social goals and influence corporate behavior.

While Wall Street is certainly free to broken record that Michael Lewis' hugely popular story about HFT and market rigging did not impact the natural course of events, the reality is it did: the collapse in Barclays' dark pool LX (shown in the bolded red line on the chart below), in the aftermath of the NY AG case against the British bank, has been documented in the past, and is just one example.