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Each year, when the Larry Fink letter goes out, it’s required reading on Wall Street. The CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, pens a memo to shareholders that quickly becomes gospel. It was Fink’s 2018 letter, for example, that helped catalyze interest in do-gooder investing known as ESG (for environmental, social and governance) — a term he later swore off amid Republican backlash.

Investors and the financial media tune in so closely because Fink’s firm controls an $11.5 trillion empire that influences the market through sheer volume. The annual letter is the finance bro equivalent of Oprah’s Favorite Things.

This year, though, Fink’s letter is getting noticed as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it says.

In sum: private capital markets, retirement savings and “democratizing” investing are in.

What’s out? Anything political.

You won’t find the words “tariff” or “Trump” anywhere in Fink’s 27-page missive, despite the fact that global markets are on a knife’s edge ahead of the president’s plans to slap tariffs on trillions of dollars worth of US imports, raising the risk of tipping the world’s biggest economy into a recession. Gone are any mentions of “stakeholder capitalism,” the theory that businesses do better when they broaden their metrics of success to include not only profits but the wellbeing of their workforce, customers and communities. And without mentioning fossil fuels, Fink emphasizes the need for “energy pragmatism.”

None of this is terribly surprising.

Fink’s letters have recently shied away from acronyms like “DEI” that the right has seized upon. BlackRock, which employs some 21,000 people, scrapped its own “aspirational workforce representation” objectives last month, citing “significant changes to the US legal and policy environment related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” per Bloomberg reporting . (Translation: We don’t want to give the White House a reason to be mad at us right now.)

“He’s definitely retreated,” Jon Solorzano, a partner at Vinson & Elkins who counsels companies on corporate governance and sustainability, told me. “I think for better or for worse, Larry Fink probably became the face of the ESG movement and probably felt a lot of blowback… I don’t think he’s going to be sticking his neck out because he’s gotten his head bit off a few times.”

The timing is also noteworthy, as BlackRock is in the middle trying to acquire two ports in the Panama Canal that are currently owned by a Hong Kong conglomerate. If the deal goes through — it’s currently under review by Chinese regulators — it would (sort of) fulfill one of the president’s promises “take back” control of the waterway.