What would Ned Johnson do? The late, great Fidelity Investments honcho built his family’s Boston-based money management firm into one of the biggest in the world over the course of a long career. Johnson died on March 23 of this year, age 91.
On April 26, just over one month later, his daughter and heir, Fidelity Chief Executive Abby Johnson, unveiled controversial plans to include bitcoin in the 401(k) platform it runs on behalf of thousands of U.S. companies. Coincidence? Probably. The bitcoin move had surely been in the pipeline for months. And Fidelity had dipped its toe into the bitcoin pool long before. But it raises the intriguing question of what Ned would have thought of this latest move. The old Yankee and Boston Brahmin had a reputation as a conservative steward of clients’ assets. He was also jealous of Fidelity’s corporate reputation. And the bitcoin move is generating publicity for all the wrong reasons. That includes getting into public scrapes with senators and the Labor Department. And associating the firm with a tanking asset that is down by a third since the announcement. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois has now joined colleagues Tina Smith (Minnesota) and Elizabeth Warren, from Fidelity’s home state …