2009

The 2009 set covers Asia-Pacific, Europe, Global, Latin America, North America. Each report is a structural analysis with its reasoning shown, its sources named, and its limits stated.

• Global Investment Outlook 2009 — The Floor — Markets bottomed in March 2009 while the economy was still deteriorating. Understanding why that is not a paradox — and what it cost to arrange — explains most of the decade that followed.
• US Venture Capital Report 2009 — The Vintage Nobody Wanted — 2009 was the hardest year in a generation to raise a venture fund and one of the best years in a generation to be deploying one. That is not a coincidence — it is the same fact viewed from two sides, and it explains most of what the asset class did next.
• Asia-Pacific Investment Report 2009 — The Instrument That Was Available — Facing a collapse in external demand, the region reached for the lever it could actually pull. Investment was fast, controllable and effective — and it worked by borrowing demand from the future while creating obligations that had to be repaid whether or not the assets earned anything.
• Brazil Investment Report 2009 — The Credibility Dividend — For the first time in its modern history, Brazil met a global crisis by cutting rates and spending more. That option had been unavailable for decades, and it existed in 2009 only because of institutional work done years earlier that had looked, at the time, like an unrewarding constraint.
• Private Credit Report 2009 — Lending Because Banks Cannot — A new lending industry was built in 2009 out of a simple structural fact: a fund with locked-up capital can hold an asset that a bank with demandable deposits cannot. That is not a skill advantage. It is a funding advantage, and it explains almost everything about what followed.
• Europe Investment Report 2009 — When the Numbers Turned Out to Be Estimates — A revision to one country's deficit figures started a crisis that lasted five years. The revision mattered less than what it revealed: that sovereign statistics are produced by the government being measured, and nobody had been checking.