A new survey of global family offices shows that currency exposure is becoming a strategic question, not a passive result of owning global assets. As confidence in the US dollar’s reserve role softens, wealthy families are beginning to treat cash, companies, and opportunities across several currencies as part of one operating system.

Private equity promised to buy companies, improve them and sell them. The selling part stopped working, so the industry built a way around it.

Corporate lending slipped out of the banks and into private funds. Until this spring, almost nobody asked for their money back.