Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Fourteen Dollars and a Bank Affiliate Float

People treat BlackRock as a Hudson Yards giant that was always public.

The 1999 issuer was the asset-management arm of PNC Bank Corp.

On 1 October 1999 BlackRock priced an initial public offering at 14 dollars a share in 1999 currency and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as BLK. The firm's own later commemoration records that listing date.

American Banker reported that the sale of nine million shares, a 14 percent stake, raised 126 million dollars. The paper called it the first time a bank-affiliated investment company had gone public.

PNC expected an after-tax gain of about 70 million dollars that quarter.

The offer came in at the low end of the range PNC had floated in August. Merrill Lynch led the books.

PNC had bought BlackRock Financial Management in 1995, when the shop ran about 25 billion dollars. By mid-1999 assets under management were 141.8 billion dollars.

The mechanism is a bank parent selling a minority slice of a fixed-income affiliate while keeping control, then watching that stub become the larger public company.

Headquarters later moved to 50 Hudson Yards. The 1999 tape printed at 11 Wall Street.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.