Private equity today looks totally different than it did 10 years ago. The alternatives industry, and particularly the private equity industry, has matured. It is way more competitive than it was, call it, 10 years ago. There's way more sponsors out there with more strategies.
And the days where you can just buy a business, improve its capital structure, and generate attractive returns are over. In this market, you need to actively improve these businesses, growing their revenue, growing the markets they can sell into, growing the number of customers they have. That is how you generate attractive returns today. Interest rates have basically popped 500 basis points and call it 18 months.
And the rate of change, the acceleration that has happened is quite rapid. And that's presented a lot of uncertainty, a lot of valuation gaps, a lot of volatility. Investors are asking themselves, is a recession going to happen? When are rates going to come down?
What are the geopolitical dynamics that I'm going to be investing into in the next 12 months? Asset selection is crucial. We need to have data to identify and understand.
in a very complicated world, what those right assets are, what those right sectors are going to be important and growing in the future. We're focused on industries like digital infrastructure, e-commerce, life sciences, industries and sectors that we think are going to grow faster than inflation, faster than GDP, and at the same time have the resiliency to manage what will be a continued volatile market environment. Over long time scales and a variety of different market backdrops, over decades, private equity has consistently outperformed perform public markets.
I wouldn't expect anything different coming out of this downturn. The economy is still growing. Businesses still need money.
And you're able to buy better businesses at cheaper valuation. We believe the investment opportunity set is only growing. And with the scale we have and the resources we have, that puts us in a position to be investing what we expect to be a lot more capital going forward, given the market environment we're in.