You’ll Take Private Assets, and Like It
Pension fund managers increasingly find that TINA has been privatized. There’s no choice but to go along, even if returns disappoint.
Big funds feel they have no choice.
Photograph: ‘The Maltese Falcon’ (1941)/Donaldson Collection/Moviepix/Getty Images
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The US stock market seems unstoppable, but much of its success is down to the way it is steadily being whittled away. Since cresting at the beginning of this century, even as prices have resumed their move upward, the market itself has shrunk and ceded ground to private assets. When big investment groups draw up their long-term capital assumptions, as Points of Return reported last month, the one universal premise seems to be that private equity and private credit will do better than anything else.