The crisis of 2008 showed the perils that can lurk in rapidly growing financial sectors. And few have grown faster in recent years than the business of fund management.
Assets under management have more than doubled in size over the past decade, and the industry now runs some $74tn of money around the globe, according to Boston Consulting Group. That is equivalent to nearly one year’s gross domestic product for the world, or roughly two-thirds the total assets of its banks.
Growth in itself is nothing to worry about. But the sector’s explosion has gone hand in hand with a shift into more illiquid assets. Over the past 30 years funds have been moving away from developed government bonds and equities to more hard-to-shift debt holdings.