The chief executive officer of BlackRock Inc, Laurence D. Fink, stated that he never thought that America would step into a prolonged phase of below-average economic growth described by the CEO of Pacific Investment Management Co, Mohamed El-Erian.

They never believed in the ‘new normal, stated Fink today over a conference call while presenting the fourth-quarter earnings for New York-based BlackRock. He further stated that they were always talking about an American economy growing three plus percent.

Speedy growth, boosted by government stimulus and the Federal Reserve’s second round of asset purchases has prompted economists to lift forecasts. El-Erian, who gave the term “new normal” about a couple of years ago for describing the long-term effect of the worst recession after the Great Depression, raised in the month of December his American economic forecast, while issuing warning that the recovery may not last.

Fink, who never fully embraced Pimco’s philosophy, earlier used the term new normal for describing a gradual recovery as America came out from the credit crisis.

Fink said that it can be said that the country is in the midst of a recovery in economies, indeed a slow one. He stated this in an interview with Bloomberg Television on June 12, 2009. He further stated that they are not forecasting an economy that’s back to normal. It’s more a new normal.

Fink, aged fifty built BlackRock from a bond shop into the biggest asset manager of the world with a series of acquisitions including the purchase of Barclays Global Investors in the year of 2009.

The firm didn’t profit like Pimco, from more than six hundred billion dollars in industry wide deposits into bond mutual funds in 2009 and 2010. Fink, who was a former bond trader, said today that it was one of the greatest failures of BlackRock which at that time could not attract a larger share of that money.