The center of the investment world is moving to Asia. This is not just a theory, or wishful thinking, or a naive thought sparked by an anecdote, but a cold, hard fact.

Late Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the brokerages Nomura (NYSE: NMR), Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and Bank of America (NYSE: BAC)  were all moving investment bankers who specialize in advising financial services companies to Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore as banks and insurers in Asia are selling record amounts of shares.

It’s like Willie Sutton’s  answer when asked why he robbed banks. “That’s where the money is,” he replied.    Financial institutions have raised a combined $171 billion in Asia outside Japan since 2006, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Bloomberg reported that the region is home to the world’s five biggest initial public offerings by financial companies in the past 12 months. AIG’s (NYSE: AIG) initial public offering of its AIA unit in Hong Kong late Thursday has been the sensation of the year; it priced at the top of its range and was oversubscribed at more than $17.8 billion. Goldman Sachs has doubled the size of its financial institutions group in Asia this year.

A friend of mine was at a Goldman-sponsored dinner late Thursday in Manhattan. I’ll tell you a few of the things he learned over the next few days. Apropos this conversation, however, the most surprising comment he heard was this: The new head of Goldman’s global wealth management unit told the room that he was “shocked” to discover, upon taking the job, how under-weight the firm was in Asian equities. He told the group that conversely he felt Goldman’s asset management unit was unduly overweight U.S. equities.

I heard the same thing from a veteran hedge fund manager at lunch on Thursday: There is a growing sense among forward-thinking managers that allocation of Western assets into Asian equities is only in the first inning. They believe, as I do, that is a far cry from the days in the 1990s when these countries had weak domestic markets, weak currencies, shocking debt levels and wildly corrupt governments that badly misallocated capital. There are many dangers, to be sure, but real growth, low debt levels and strong currencies will provide a strong counter-balance.

You can see in the chart above that while the Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand markets are up a lot in the past six months, they are only just starting to crawl out of a 15-year bear market. There’s a very long way to go before these markets could be considered overvalued.

I’ll have more on this subject over the weekend, and of course over the next few years. The bottom line is that day by day we can see a shift toward the southern hemisphere countries in Asia and South America as they grow in importance in world trade for finished goods, and not just as a source of cheap labor. We can make good money participating in their capital formation.

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