Sensing a broad change in the capital markets in recent years, the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance set out to better understand what was happening. Jonathan Koppell describes what he and his colleagues learned from a series of discussions with investors, directors, managers, and regulators around the globe.

Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico and a scholar at Yale, argues that overreacting to fears about sovereign wealth funds could hobble the global financial system. But he also points to the real risks inherent in the global imbalances that have fueled the recent growth of SWFs.

A firm of financiers, technologists, and policy mavens is bringing capital to bear on projects around the world that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They hope to help turn the tide against climate change — and make a healthy profit.

The emergence of new capital is an old phenomenon. Scottish investors bought cattle ranches in the Wild West. Early skyscrapers were funded with bonds marketed to small investors. The first corporate raiders assaulted apparently unassailable institutions. Index funds cut out the middlemen. Wealthy Japanese companies bought up American real estate. Look at the responses to each of these innovations.

A South African government program aimed at addressing deep historical inequities enabled a union-owned investment fund to build up enough capital to reach around the globe. The mostly black workers in the union now own a piece of a hotel chain in the Middle East and a clean-energy company in Pittsburgh. How much can be learned from this success?

Q(n) readers offer a variety of perspectives on the question.

From 2005 through the middle of 2007, one public company after another was bought out and went private. The size of the deals escalated — Hertz for $15 billion, HCA for $33 billion, Equity Office Properties for $39 billion, TXU Energy for $44 billion. Then the megadeals stopped. Andrew Metrick explains what happened.

The wealth generated by the dot-com boom of the 1990s produced a new generation of philanthropists, determined to use their capital and their business savvy to solve social problems. A decade later, have they transformed the world of philanthropy?

Catherine Labio, an associate professor of comparative literature and French at Yale, studies the relationship between economics, fiction, and art. She teaches a course called Fictions of Capital, which explores the depiction of money and the economy from the 17th century to the present.

By 2006, the subprime market had grown to 20% of the total U.S. mortgage market, and 75% of these loans were securitized and sold off to investors around the world, facilitating an influx of capital. With credit easily available, more people than ever before were able to buy homes — but then the market seized up.

The Dubai International Financial Center was established in 2004 as a “gateway” to the capital of the oil-producing countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Yale SOM’s Ira Millstein and Jonathan Koppell spoke with a group of experienced investors in the region about the DIFC and the role of capital in the GCC.

Two decades ago, socially motivated investing accounted for a tiny percentage of worldwide capital. Today, investors representing $14 trillion have signed on to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investing. What influence are they having?

Sovereign wealth funds have become a source of controversy. They have the size — several trillion dollars and growing — to swing or stabilize markets. Meanwhile, their sometimes secretive strategies have invited worries that they could be used as tools of government policy. Jeffrey E. Garten, former SOM dean and former undersecretary of commerce for international trade, talked to Ng Kok Song, the managing director and group chief investment officer at the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, about how one of the world’s largest SWFs is run.

Larry Summers has analyzed macroeconomic policies as a top academic economist, and helped form those policies in positions such as secretary of the treasury. He provides his take on the new forms of capital that are likely to affect markets, economies, and lives in the years ahead.

With notable prescience, Shyam Sunder, the James L. Frank Professor of Accounting, Economics, and Finance at Yale SOM co-authored an editorial in the Financial Times with Stella Fearnley of Bournemouth University on August 23, 2007, warning of dangers from converging accounting models.

Responding to Q4's conversation "Did innovation cause the credit crisis?" Rick Antle, William S. Beinecke Professor of Accounting at Yale SOM, puts accounting changes and their role in the current financial turmoil in context.

Read an excerpt from Robert Shiller's new book, The Subprime Solution, in which he explores what the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices reveal about the housing price bubble and its role in the current financial turmoil.

When interviews for the print edition of Q4 were conducted in April through August 2008, sovereign wealth funds seemed like a potential source of stability in the global financial system, due to their large pools of available capital. But when credit markets froze and stocks tumbled, SWFs seemed to stay on the sidelines. Rachel Ziemba is an analyst with RGE Monitor specializing in the strategies of SWFs. She provides her perspective on what these funds have been doing during the global economic turmoil.

Soltage is one company looking to finance the widespread adoption of clean, cheap solar power.