Their job was not to invest in productive assets like entrepreneurs, but to be the temporary stewards of savings which they invested in liquid and, generally, financial assets (as opposed to, say, property). In the US, assets under management (AUM) grew dramatically from $3.1 billion in 1951 to some $17 trillion in 2015.13 In the UK, the asset management industry accounted for £5.7 trillion by the end of 2015, more than three times the size of GDP in the same year.14
