On Thursday afternoon, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio tweeted about the wonders of the Left’s favorite new New York icon: the bronze statue of a “fearless girl” who stands in defiance of the even more famous statue of a Wall Street bull.
Here are a few things you need to know:
1. The “Fearless Girl” Statue Is Funded By A Hedge Fund. State Street Global Advisors is behind the sculpture. State Street Global manages $2.5 trillion in assets. The notion that it funded a statue to rail against capitalism is idiotic. State Street isn’t just representative of Wall Street – it invests in Wall Street on the most general level, by putting all money into funds that “track the performance of indexes.” As Wall Street goes, so too does Fearless Girl.
2. That Hedge Fund Has Few Female Executives. State Street Global Advisors has 28 high level executives, according to The New York Daily News. Five are female. Total.
3. Employment Relies Heavily On Wall Street In New York City. According to the New York Federal Reserve, the financial services sector represented 35 percent of all paid income in the city of New York as of 2000, and more than one in ten people employed in New York City were employed on Wall Street.
The Fearless Girl statue is a bit of stupid virtue signaling by a firm looking for some good publicity. De Blasio has embraced it, because he is a stupid man. But here’s what De Blasio should understand: if the bull actually walks away from New York, so too do all the jobs.