Jan Fichtner Profile picture
Post-doc at UvA, CORPNET. Researching global finance: the re-concentration of corporate ownership, structural power, financialization and offshore finance
Mikko Niskanen Profile picture 1 subscribed
Dec 2, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
🇺🇸💰 Trillion dollar question:
US portfolio holdings of foreign securities are the highest for which country? Japan, China, Germany? Another country?
What do you think? 🤔
...

Small 🧵about global finance. Let's go ⬇️ The UK is 2nd largest destination of US portfolio holdings with a massive $1.6tn - Canada #3 with $1.5tn and Japan #4 with $1.3tn (all large equity and debt holdings).

Data is from Treasury International Capital (TIC).
Nov 16, 2021 22 tweets 9 min read
📕 New book "Trillions" by @RobinWigg of the @FT on the history of index funds and how this +$20 trillion industry is changing global finance (and maybe even capitalism too).

A book review 🧵infused with some of the relevant academic research. Let's go.

penguin.co.uk/books/315/3155… Image 2/ Wigglesworth takes us back over half a century to trace the intellectual groundwork that led to the development of index funds. The landmark S&P 500 index was launched in 1957. Some people began to realize that most fund managers are not able to generate higher returns than...
May 7, 2020 4 tweets 2 min read
A short thread showing a few figures from the brand-new 2020 Investment Company Fact Book:

Massive shift from actively managed funds ($1.7 trillion outflows) to passive index funds ($1.8 trillion inflows) continues in the US.
1/4 Total net assets ($4.3 trillion) and number of ETFs reach new all-time highs at end-2019 - mostly managed by the "Big Three" of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, of course.
2/4
Dec 10, 2019 8 tweets 6 min read
Out now in @RIPEJournal - the first IPE analysis of the three big index providers MSCI, S&P DJI, and FTSE Russell:
"Steering capital: the growing private authority of index providers in the age of passive asset management"
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
@johannes_petry @UvACORPNET
1/n
Since the global financial crisis there is a money mass migration of over US$3,000 billion from actively managed funds to passively managed funds, such as ETFs, that simply replicate indices. The important benchmark indices are owned by the three big index providers.
2/n