Will Dunham is President and CEO of the American Investment Council, the largest private equity and private credit trade association in the United States. Representing firms from trillion-dollar platforms to small and mid-market managers, he is the industry’s front-line advocate in Washington, charged with protecting private capital’s licence to operate and correcting the widening gap between online rhetoric and real-world impact.

We explore why private equity is more embedded in American life than most people realise, how political narratives have diverged from the data, and why Dunham believes long term private capital remains aligned with the interests of workers, savers and local communities.

Main Street, not Wall Street: where private equity actually shows up

One of Dunham’s most powerful tools in Washington is a simple list: every private-equity-backed company in a policymaker’s district. The surprise is universal. Around 13 million Americans now work in companies backed by private capital, and 85 per cent of recent investment has gone into small and mid-sized firms with 500 employees or fewer.

These businesses don’t carry a sign saying “backed by private equity”. They are ice-cream brands scaling from a food truck to national distribution, manufacturing companies reshoring US production, and medical innovators developing new technologies. For Dunham, each investment is a long bet on the US economy. If workers and communities don’t succeed, neither do the firms backing them.

Online narrative vs empirical reality

Google “private equity and housing” and you’ll find a flood of alarmist headlines. The numbers tell a different story. Private equity owns less than 1 per cent of US single-family homes, making the idea of “cornering the market” mathematically impossible. Instead, firms are increasing supply through build-to-rent communities and rent-to-own models that bridge families into good school districts while they save for deposits.

Healthcare follows a similar pattern. The headlines fixate on negative anecdotes, but private investment has funded 250+ urgent-care clinics, expanded rural access, and backed medical-device breakthroughs that would not have been financed easily in public markets. As Dunham puts it, the antidote to bad anecdotes is good data, and the research on access and quality is far more balanced than the headlines suggest.

Private credit: grown-up capital, not systemic risk

Despite growing concern from commentators, Dunham sees private credit as the opposite of systemic. Funds are financed by equity, not short-term deposits, which avoids the classic mismatch that destabilises banks. The Federal Reserve has echoed this view. Demand is growing organically as businesses seek long-term, partnership-oriented capital at moments when they are not ready to sell.

Ross notes that the leverage-on-leverage narrative simply does not match how the asset class actually works. Dunham agrees: private credit is filling a financing gap, not creating a new fault line.

The next frontier: opening 401(k)s to private markets

US public pension schemes have long invested in private equity and often cite it as their strongest performing allocation. Defined-contribution savers, however, have been locked out. Recent moves by the Trump administration instruct the Department of Labor to introduce clear guard rails so that professionally managed target-date funds can allocate to private markets.

The rationale is simple. Public markets have become highly concentrated, while the number of listed US companies has halved over 25 years. Doing nothing is not conservative; it increases concentration risk. Allowing diversified access to thousands of private companies may, in Dunham’s view, be the more prudent option for long term savers.

Defending the licence to operate

Dunham resists the caricature of a powerful lobby machine. He describes the AIC as a translator between investors and policymakers, effective only because the underlying economic contribution is real. The biggest threats are not dramatic policy shocks but many small, incremental steps that make it harder to invest, grow companies and create jobs.

Private capital, he argues, is deeply embedded in America’s economic story: from reshoring manufacturing to national-security supply chains to more than 500 AI and data-centre investments in the past five years. The task now is to make that story visible.

As Dunham says, the licence to operate is earned one district, one company, and one conversation at a time.