This book is about what institutional investors do, how they do it, and when and where they do it: it is about the production of investment returns in the global economy. It also tackles some of the key issues found in the academic literature on the theory of the firm. It looks at ways other treatments of the modern corporation share an abiding interest in the management and organization of the production process. In this case, the focus is on the global financial services industry, where the building blocks underpinning the study of industrial corporations are less relevant. One of the publication’s goals is to explain how and why the production of investment returns differs from that of manufactured goods. Another is to provide an analytical framework that situates financial institutions within the complex web of the intermediaries that dominate developed financial markets. As such, the book is more than an analysis of the organization and management of institutional investors; it is also an analysis of the global financial services industry.