Larry Fink Still Has Something to Prove

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -You've got to hand it to Larry Fink, one of just a few men on Wall Street--Blackstone Group(BX) 's Steve Schwarzman is another who comes to mind--who can legitimately claim to have outdone Napoleon in leveraging an inferiority complex into a global empire.

BlackRock, Inc.(BLK) 's CEO and Chairman may have built the world's largest money manager from scratch in 20 years, but that was just his first act. During the past four years, his BlackRock Solutions unit has landed plum assignments from governments includes the U.S., Ireland and Greece as they attempt to work their way through economic crises worse than they've seen in several decades.

BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink

Now, as Fink and BlackRock prepare to report first quarter earnings Wednesday, they are slowly moving in on the turf of Goldman Sachs(GS) JPMorgan Chase(JPM) and Citigroup(C) in trying to rewrite the rules of the securities industry.

While BlackRock shares have handily outperformed the giant investment banks during the past one five and 10-year periods, Fink still longs for the spotlight afforded to those institutions. That is likely one of the reasons BlackRock is reporting its first quarter earnings this week, alongside those companies, as opposed to, say, April 26, when giant-but-boring money managers Franklin Resources(BEN) and Federated Investors(FII) are scheduled to give their reports.

"People always asked me what do I care about the most for our company, and that's an easy answer; it's respect," Fink told Bloomberg earlier this month.