Should Ordinary US Retirement Accounts Be Investing In Private Assets?
May 28, 2025
On the surface, the proposal sounds so attractive: give ordinary Americans the same investment opportunities that billionaires, endowments and sovereign wealth funds already enjoy. Over the last couple of decades, the ranks of public companies have shrunk, while the number of private equity-owned businesses has quintupled, and private credit funds have muscled into lending. PE assets alone topped $4.7tn last year, nearly twice the total in 2019…
“For an American household that wants to set aside money for the long term, some portion of it should be in private assets because it’s such a large portion of the market,” says Michael Pedroni, a former US Treasury official who now runs the consultancy Highland Global Advisors. “If you can do it in the right way and find the right vehicle, it would be a good thing for fairness.”