Private Markets’ Exposure Rises at Top Pension Funds

Regulation and compliance have driven an unprecedented wall of US retirement money into private assets, a new report by Bloomberg Intelligence shows, casting new light on the real-world risks from finance’s continued push into areas beyond the traditional oversight of regulators.

The top 20 US pension funds alone hold about half a trillion dollars of private market exposure, the analysts found, with some having doubled their allocations to unlisted investments over the past decade. Exposures across the broader $43.4 trillion of US retirement assets are also rising, against a backdrop of declining numbers of US publicly-traded companies and evermore privately-held unicorns worth more than $1 billion apiece.