Countries with a greater share of private equity investment also, on average, have higher growth rates.1 Private equity is also an important variable for the German labour market: BVK statistics show that, at the end of 2010, German portfolio enterprises in which private equity companies were invested employed some 1.2 million people.2 As for the financial sector as a whole, the last few years were not exactly rosy for private equity companies either.
BIS Review 34/2010  1  Among the most serious and most insidious barriers to competition in financial services is the too-big-to-fail problem. Like all of you, I remember well the frightening weeks in the fall of 2008, when the failure or near-failure of several large, complex, and interconnected firms shook the financial markets and our economy to their foundations.