> There is roughly $6 trillion of it, sitting in American public pension funds, currently being allocated in a way that serves nobody. Yeah. That's what pensio

> There is roughly $6 trillion of it, sitting in American public pension funds, currently being allocated in a way that serves nobody. Yeah. That's what pension funds do. They accumulate money and hand it out to people who think they damn well better be able to withdraw upon it. In 1960, the birth rate in the US started to decline. It hasn't had a meaningful rise since. [0] Markets can experience natural growth - typically through birth rates, sometimes through immigration - or they can begin to more thoroughly monetize capital as to create growth from fewer people. The Baby Boomers thoroughly broke the ability to grow through natural means, and it's been that way for 25-30 years. This is a problem, because you need that natural growth to fund the retirements that the Boomers planned on having, along with the entitlement state in the US, which focuses almost exclusively on people over the age of 65 with OASDI and Medicare. So how do you solve this problem? If you're investing the hospital business, for example, you can no longer expect the same sort of growth that you used to if your plan is to have a current customer birth their 2.1 kids in your maternity ward. You now need to do other things to monetize the current customer, like charging him more for his next procedure, or - even better - looking to developing markets like India (or China 25 years ago) and focus your investment there. It's a lot easier to bring a rural clinic "up to spec" in China than it is in the US, because one started out with far cheaper needs to meet. X-ray machines are easy to install; cancer centers with advanced imaging machines and academic medicine practitioners are expensive. And that's what the investors do. They find ways to get in on deals that aren't in the US. It's not just medicine, either. That capital that built Shenzhen into a tech mecca came from the US. In the meantime, they need to find ways to exist in the American market, so they do what I mentioned earlier: they monetize the hell out of customers they already have. If that means closing a hospital and making the "customer" (read: guy having a heart attack) go to one twenty miles further away that has a better business value, then they do exactly that. Or, they find ways to monetize the younger generations more, since they're not drawing on pensions and IRAs yet. Otherwise they risk gobbling up the returns they handed back to their members with increased costs. [0]https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...