Luke Flemmer: The Private Markets Inflection Point

Markets don't just happen. They're built.Public markets weren't a completely organic development. They were engineered over centuries, through boom and design and crisis. Every layer of trust investors now take for granted: the information rights, the settlement rails and the benchmarks, all came from people who did the work and built them.Luke Flemmer is one of those people. He runs private assets at MSCI. His central point: private markets are at the very start of that work.Private used to be the spice. Now it's the main dish. Institutional portfolios hold between 20 and 50 percent in private assets. The allocations scaled fast, but the infrastructure underneath them did not.Most people picture private equity as a guy in a vest in Midtown. Most of it is actually pension money. It is individual savers and capital managed on behalf of regular people. Private capital is public capital.Bad information flow is intrinsically value destructive. It slows the market and shrinks returns for the people these institutions serve.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Luke and Marc cover:Asset-level benchmarks: why investors need to see exposure across funds, not just inside themDaily nowcasting indexes for PE and private credit - closing the gap between quarterly marks and real valueThe classification problem: the industry still can't agree on what to call things (and what that costs)Why information asymmetry in private markets is mostly underdevelopment, not design, and why closing that gap doesn't harm returnsHow AI lets firms leapfrog data infrastructure gaps and what separates the institutions that will author that shift from those that absorb it"You need some degree of transparency to drive more robust price formation. Once you start to drive price formation, you start to drive liquidity. Once you start to drive liquidity, you kick off this data flywheel."Markets get built by people who decide to build them.