NEW YORK -- The dollar's rally and faltering U.S. stocks are a timely reminder that despite the global recovery, we still haven't shaken last year's financial crisis from our system.

Truth be told, we won't shake it out for years. But the real legacy of the crisis isn't in the risk-appetite-to-risk-aversion pendulum that dominates the dollar's relationship with shares. Rather, it's in a worldwide paradigm shift that will permanently reshape the investment landscape.

On the one hand, according to a survey of 225 asset managers sponsored by Citigroup Inc. and investment-management behemoth Pacific Global Investors, investors have become fundamentally more conservative. No longer striving for "alpha" returns as they were in the precrisis boom, pension funds and other savings managers are now content to match their benchmarks and maintain prudently diversified portfolios. Complexity, the survey's report says, is giving way to simplicity.

Yet at the same time, the definition of risk in portfolio structures is going through a massive sea change.

The giant swathe of the world that bears the increasingly outdated label "emerging markets" is graduating to the big league. Securities issued in and by these developing countries, whose economies account for 50% of global gross domestic product, have traditionally occupied the risky portion of investors' portfolios. But now they're staking a claim to a more proportionally consistent allocation, at the expense of developed markets.

"People have got to fundamentally rethink the way they perceive the world to be structured," says Jerome Booth, head of research for Ashmore Investment Management in London. "Pension funds have got to think about 50% of their portfolio going into emerging markets and not thinking of it as an add-on, something they do for a bit, or treat it as a cyclical phenomenon."

This shift in global relevance has played out in economic data this past week. South Korea registered third-quarter growth of 2.9%, its strongest quarterly result in seven years. By contrast, the U.K. posted a dismal 0.4% decline in the same period, marking a sixth straight quarterly contraction and the longest recession since record-keeping began in 1955.

These two countries' fortunes mirror those of two bigger ones: China, projected by most economists to grow at more than 8% this year, and the U.S., whose 2% to 3% medium-term growth outlook is far more subdued than would typically be seen after a recession and where unemployment is expected to rise above 10% and stay there.

Such divergences can no longer be attributed to differently synchronized economic cycles or to the boom-bust nature of emerging-market returns. They reflect post-crisis structural differences that will give emerging markets an advantage over the developed world for years to come.

The old economies cannot return to strong growth until both their banks and their consumers work off trillions of dollars in debt accumulated in the binge before the bust. Emerging countries aren't burdened in this way. And their consumers, who own far fewer cars and plasma TVs than their rich country counterparts, have plenty of pent-up spending to do.

Meanwhile, in developed countries baby-boomers are approaching retirement age, creating a very different demographic dynamic than exists in the younger societies of the developing world and growing pool of savings.

Still reeling from the crisis, the professionals who manage that pool are instinctively returning to conservative diversification strategies. But they'll do their clients a disfavor if they don't also try something new when it comes to global allocations.