Not all financial innovations have come to grief in the credit crunch. The explosive growth of exchange-traded funds (etfs), investment pools that are listed on stockmarkets around the world, continued throughout the past decade. At the end of 2009 etf assets under management topped the $1 trillion mark for the first time, according to BlackRock, a fund-management firm. The industry's assets were just $40 billion at the end of 1999.
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