When Clive Cowdery came to Australia this week to check on Resolution Group’s $38 billion in life insurance assets, he landed the day before a consortium led byCowdery says the Ramsay takeover is part of a worrying broader structural change in global capital markets whereby private capital is crowding out the role of stock exchanges.
“It’s becoming increasingly possible for you to grow a business for many years if not decades in private hands owned by an increasingly sophisticated group of patient private capital holders whether they be 401K funds in America or superannuation funds here and pension schemes including the ones who provided capital to Resolution Group.
“That’s my view of the balance between needing to keep entrepreneurs willing to share the rewards of their growth with the public markets and Mom and Pop capitalism,” he says. “That’s highly valuable because it allows you to then move towards the marginally higher returning dollar somewhere else,” he says.