For as long as I remember, meaning going back into the 1980s, the Merrill Lynch arm of Bank of America has conducted a monthly poll of global equity portfolio managers (global meaning both managers located around the globe and having a mandate to invest in stocks in any major stock markets), asking for their asset allocations by country.

As the structure of the world’s stock markets stood at the end of 2024, the US comprised about 3/4 of the total market cap of investable equity securities worldwide. This means the “global” market is basically the US with bells and whistles. According to BofA, the typical manager had substantially more than the market weighting in US stocks at the end of this January.

No longer.

According to Bloomberg, the survey taken in February shows a massive shift away from the US since the inauguration. Global PMs have moved from substantial overweights to equally substantial underweights. I haven’t seen the BofA figures myself, only the financial news reports, which are not very precise in describing what has occurred. What they seem to be saying, though, is that portfolio managers, who typically move in small, say, at most 5%, increments, shifted about a third of the money they’re managing from the US to other stock markets last month.

This action communicates two things: the large magnitude of the bad economic things PMs think will happen here and the urgency of the need to protect clients’ money by moving it elsewhere.

Other than the global flight from Japan during its lost decade of the 1990s, I can’t think of another movement of anything like this magnitude in the close to half-century I’ve been watching world stock markets.

The big question now is whether the worst of this capital flight is over. My guess is that for the moment it is. On the other hand, global managers still do have half their assets in the US.