The Virtuous Cycle: The Global Potential of Capital Markets

As a fiduciary asset manager, our mission is to help more people invest better, advance their long-term financial well-being, and retire with dignity. We believe in the power of capital markets to help more people achieve just that. Capital markets are growing and evolving around the world, to better mobilize the tremendous amount of investment that will be needed in the coming decades. BlackRock has continuously adapted with them, to make investing easier – more affordable and less complicated – for our clients across all geographies and segments of the capital markets. In this paper, we draw on our global experience to set out our view on how capital markets can fully realize their potential to both drive economic growth and ensure that more people are able to share in their prosperity generating power.

Key takeaways

• Governments around the world are focused on stimulating durable economic growth in the face of a range of structural changes to the global economy. At the same time, they are seeking to ensure that prosperity is shared more broadly across their populations.
  
  
• We believe that capital markets are the key connector that can make addressing these challenges complementary. Their ability to connect people’s long-term savings with productive uses of capital will be central to mobilizing investment to support innovation, growth and job creation, and at the same time, help more people share in the benefits of economic prosperity. This is the virtuous economic cycle.
  
  
• It’s no surprise then, that growing capital markets is a priority for many policymakers. However, the starting points are different around the world. In some places, growth means attracting more investors to already mature markets, or making existing market structures more efficient. In others, the conversation is about creating entire markets from scratch.
  
  
• While there is no single blueprint for what every capital market must look like, we believe growth comes by giving more people meaningful opportunities to invest their savings and ensuring that markets function in a way that protects their interests. Both regulation and market innovation play a central role in realizing this.
  
  
• In our view, to unlock the full potential of capital markets globally, policymakers and industry around the world should work together to support market growth and technological innovation that can:
  • Give more people the ability to invest
    
    
  • Promote effective and resilient market structures across the capital markets spectrum
    
    
  • Pursue growth-oriented economic policies to complete the virtuous cycle