MutualFundWire.com: How Long Can Fund Firms Weather the Bear Market?

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Friday, March 13, 2020

How Long Can Fund Firms Weather the Bear Market?

Fundsters, cross your fingers that things turn around in the next six months.

Robert Charles Pozen
MIT Sloan School of Management
Senior Lecturer

Bob Pozen, the retired former MFS and Fidelity bigwig who now teaches at MIT and literally co-wrote the book on the mutual fund industry, tells the Boston Globe that he predicts that fund firms should hold up to the current market volatility ok if the market stabilizes by September. Yet Pozen worries that asset managers will make layoffs if the market fails to stabilize by then. (He notes that they'll be figuring out their 2021 budgets then.)

The Globe puts Pozen's predictions in the context of what happened in money management after the financial crisis. Investment industry employment in Massachusetts (home to Eaton Vance, Fidelity, MFS, Putnam, SSGA, and many more) peaked at 53,500, the paper notes: five and a half years later, in early 2013, that had fallen 20 percent to about 43,000. By the end of 2019, that number had only partially recovered, to about 46,000. (It's a good bet that relocation and the active-to-passive shift weighed on those numbers, too.)

Printed from: MFWire.com/story.asp?s=61013

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