"Go long agriculture and water and go to the beach," said Mr Fink, whose creation was now the biggest funds manager in the world, with $US3.5 trillion ($3.07 trillion) under management -- more than the GDP of Germany.

"Put those investments in the bottom drawer for 10 years. It's unlike anything else we have in the world."

Agriculture and water would even beat energy investments, he said.

"They're finding lots of ways to find new energy -- Israel's going to be an exporter of natural gas and I'm hearing there's more oil under Iraq than Saudi Arabia, for instance, although it's not secure."

BlackRock has grown very big in recent years. Founded as a bond trader in 1988 by Mr Fink and three colleagues, it has in recent years swallowed up Merrill Lynch Asset Management and Britain's Barclays Global Investors (BGI).

"It's stabilised now," said Damien Frawley, BlackRock's Australian head and a former Wallaby forward.

As Mr Fink puts it: "We lost the battle in Australia in the first year, but it's a long war."

He said that last year, BlackRock's Australian equity product underperformed the local market by about 100 basis points.

He admitted the BGI deal was "lumpy", with client turnover of more than 5 per cent, but that the group's pro forma earnings per share had climbed from $US8.04 to $US10.92 over the 2009 and 2010 years.

He also notes that, unlike many mergers, this one actually produced jobs, lifting headcount from 8400 to the current 9500 globally.

He was not familiar with Australia, where the nation's institutions were reportedly way overweight in equities, but said most of the superannuation money in countries such as the US was way overweight in bonds.

"A lot of US company pension funds are reporting returns of around 12 per cent per annum from their portfolios, but the fact is that in many cases there's more money going out than there is coming in," he said, pressing his case to see US funds buying more growth equities.

"I don't think it was an accident the US market had such a good rise in 2010," he said, pointing to the Dow Jones Industrial Average's 9 per cent rise while Australia's market actually lost ground.

"I see no reason for the US market to have a bad year this year either."

On big picture issues, he said the US economy had been badly hit by careless lending standards and an oversupply of about 400,000 houses a year over a number of years.

"The US housing market will not grow for three or four years," he said, admitting that the necessary cutback in building had cost the US economy 4 million construction jobs, exacerbating national unemployment by more than 3 percentage points.

And China? "In Australia you have the wind at your back," he said. He said China had "done a very good job of navigating its economy" and that, with the huge infrastructure expenditure necessary to spread factories inland from the coastal provinces, "it will be the juggernaut".