Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan said the world’s best investors now operate in places such as the UAE and Singapore, criticizing American funds for being too focused on benchmarks.

Apollo and other private equity firms are increasingly turning to the Middle East and Asia as deal-making activity dwindled last year due to higher interest rates.

At the start of his career, Rowan “thought the single best investors in the world were in the U.S.,” he said in a nearly hour-long interview on Tuesday with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. “That’s no longer the case.”