"If I can access different types of capital pools," he said, "I can have continuous access to capital.
In Mr. Sufi's view, one reason is that not everyone is able to dip into this overflowing capital pool.
The private capital pool is enormous, and even a small redirecting of that capital could have a huge impact on the world's most pressing problems, Morse said.
Any portion of that huge capital pool can be raised within a matter of days when Kohlberg, Kravis makes a so-called capital call to its partners.
"If they found a way to do small deals economically, that would be interesting because it could greatly increase the available capital pool," Baca says.
Some migrants, for instance, send home money to savings accounts at small bank-like microfinance institutions, which use the resulting capital pool to lend to local entrepreneurs.
In 1989, he joined American financiers in creating an $80 million fund for Hungarian investment, the largest capital pool in the country.
And corporate funds, sovereign funds, and even VC funds have capital pools of tens of billions of dollars — all looking for the next Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, or Alibaba.
Bain predicts the global capital pool will swell to nearly $1 quadrillion by the end of this decade, creating an ocean of "capital superabundance" 10 times greater than the world's underlying gross domestic product.
Small-town banks, with limited capital, were hopelessly inadequate before the scale of the emerging new economy; only Manhattan bankers had the large capital pools to effect these mergers.
