I'm wondering if the issue here is not 'the economy is picking up, let's invest elsewhere', but rather that investors don't have investment vehicles to put their money into other areas of the economy that need it most. The public markets are booming, and so is the tech sector, which I am guessing has a greater chance of a liquidity event than businesses in most other industries. While these two areas are doing fine, the small business sector, which is the largest portion of our economy, continues to struggle to get access to capital. Many of these small businesses could generate 20-30% returns, but investors have no way to easily get their money back out of the business - they'll never IPO, and a private acquisition is rare. This lack of liquidity in one of the largest asset classes of our economy seems to be the major bottleneck we're facing right now.<p>EDIT: I should add....the JOBS act and Crowdfunding are giving small businesses and entrepreneurs more options for finding funding, but getting a return on that investment still remains a question. In addition, crowdfunding as an industry is somewhere maybe in the billions, whereas the financial services sector is in the trillions, so the impact is still relatively small, although growing fast.
In Europe, we should not forget that the situation of Greece has not yet been resolved and the country has resorted to shuffling every internal bank account in order to pay the IMF.<p>The next final demand notice arrives on June 5. <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11617208/Greek-default-woes-hit-the-euro.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11617208/Greek-...</a>
I think the premise the economy will 'pick up' is highly questionable. Furthermore I think we will see very low interest rates in the US and Europe for a long long time.
If you look closer at all the jobs being created, they're mostly part-time and for the elderly. The US government is lying. The economy is not recovering.<p>The FED can't raise rates without sending the economy back into recession. QE 4 will soon be here.
The problem with this analysis is that the VC's investing money in companies aren't choosing between various asset classes - they have funds committed to their investment thesis, so they aren't going to go invest somewhere else if returns start looking better in other sectors. It's the LPs who theoretically may allocate less money to the VC's if they see better yields elsewhere, but their fund commitments are long term and take a long time to change. Funds have a life of 7-10 years and lots of folks have just raised new funds, so there's a lot locked in that will keep going into startups for a while now.
the US economy is not doing well; As long as interest rates remain so low, ever more money will plow into VCs/startup investing to get better returns.