Fink Phoned Trump Directly to Pitch BlackRock’s Panama Deal

Donald Trump promised on Day One to seize the Panama Canal.

“We’re taking it back,” the U.S. president declared in his inaugural address.

Within weeks, Wall Street billionaire Larry Fink was on the line with the White House.

His pitch: Fink’s investment company, BlackRock Inc., was interested in buying the ports on either side of waterway, shifting them into American hands, according to people familiar with the discussion. And with that, there would be no need to have the U.S. take the century-old canal by force.

So went days of whirlwind negotiations that now are set to deliver control of those ports to a consortium led by BlackRock, the $11.6 trillion investment giant Fink has run for almost four decades.

The deal, which will hand the seller $19 billion, reflects an extraordinary confluence of Trump’s America First vision and Wall Street’s globe-spanning quest for profit.

Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to regain U.S. ownership of the Panama Canal, which he has claimed, without evidence, is run by China.

Fink capitalized on that desire to secure the biggest infrastructure deal in BlackRock’s history — handing Trump a win as the president flexes over international trade, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, NATO and more.

The deal is also a sign of Fink’s and BlackRock’s ambitions to clinch major deals in far-flung private markets, and compete with the biggest alternative asset managers. In a statement announcing the transaction March 4, he boasted of BlackRock’s ties to companies and governments around the world, noting: “We are increasingly the first call.”

When Trump took the lectern on the night of March 4 for a primetime address, he hailed the deal as a step toward “reclaiming” the canal for the