In today’s turbulent global markets, institutional investors — such as global pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, governmental investment funds and insurance companies — are sitting on the sidelines. Fund managers are wary of making long-term commitments to business enterprises, which may not survive the year. In such times of crisis, U.S. infrastructure has always proven to offer a flight to safety into a secure, long-dated investment vehicle with attractive, inflation-adjusted returns. It has been a means for investors to mitigate short-term political risks and, in doing so, produce long-term, quantifiable cash returns. Nonetheless, the public health and political risks inherent in the COVID-19 era have produced such market uncertainty that mitigating today’s risks seems insurmountable.
The longer institutional investors remain on the sidelines, the deeper the global crisis will become. At the same time, a deepening crisis will only aggravate the short-term pol
