>Now those regulations are being undermined by this new backdoor approach, and so even public and regulated investments are becoming more risky. It’s a bad trend and it will only reverse when people inevitably follow the incentives and there’s a big crisis.

It's hardly "backdoor" when pension funds and other institutions could always have bought private companies. If anything the recent shift to ETFs and passive investing is a move in the opposite direction. In the past such institutions would have managed their portfolios in-house, ie. private equity.