In November, Institutional Investing in Infrastructure’s Editorial Advisory Board met in Chicago over three days to discuss global infrastructure investing. i3’s board comprises 43 members: 15 institutional investors, including public and corporate pensions, sovereign wealth funds, and insurance companies, with nearly $1.5 trillion in total assets under management and more than $44 billion in infrastructure holdings; 10 consultants with more than $4.3 trillion in total assets under management and more than $62 billion in infrastructure assets under advisement; and 16 investment managers and placement agents, with an aggregate $2.1 trillion in assets under management and $154 billion in infrastructure holdings. Other board members include infrastructure policy experts from academia and government.

Investor demand for real assets continues to grow despite macro and political concerns, despite a challenging political and economic environment. Investors are attracted by the diversification on offer and potential illiquidity premium over public markets, according to Aviva Investors’ 2020 Real Assets Survey.

In the July/August issue of i3, I wrote the Market Perspective “Notes from the road” and, as I mentioned then, IREI is uniquely positioned as a firm to speak with various participants in our market. This is because we are not focused as much as our readers are on deal closings and/or fund raising, which is different for a publication in our market. We put a lot of our focus on institutional investors’ infrastructure programs and allocations and the capital formation that comes from this part of the market.

Infrastructure investors operate in increasingly uncertain times. Compared with past years, observers note that global politics is lacking continuity. We note the rise of populist governments in many regions — and busy election calendars during the first half-year across Asia and the past year in Latin America (with Argentina yet to come). Downward regulatory tariff revisions in Europe equally add to this uncertainty. Finally, protectionist policies have given rise to trade tensions between economic powerhouses such as the United States and China.

The number of infrastructure greenfield deals have increased in North America in the third quarter of the year, with the brownfield market remaining stable, according to a new report from Inframation and Sparkspread.

Were it not for the written word, Homer’s Odyssey — and other indelible fragments of our oral history — would have been another opus lost to the winds of time. The modest process of rec-ord keeping, transforming from purely dictation to the written script, preserved so much of the past we now cherish. Millenia later, as that process evolved to cyberspace, record keeping has become as much about facilitating business operations and brokering trust between transact-ing parties as preserving great works of art.