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Jerome Powell's term as Fed Chair ends May 15th, and his likely successor Kevin Warsh is poised to walk into the most fractured Fed since 1992. In this episode, we're breaking down what actually happened at Powell's final meeting, who the dissenters were and why, and what it tells us about the Fed Warsh is about to inherit.

But the bigger question we're wrestling with is this: what does Kevin Warsh actually want to do? He's been remarkably vocal for 20 years about his views on monetary policy, and his philosophy represents a real regime change — a more unified Fed, less hand-holding of markets, a smaller balance sheet, and a return to the Fed staying in its lane. We walk through who actually sits on the FOMC and how voting works, what quantitative easing really is and why we started doing it in the first place, the difference between monetary and fiscal policy (and why people keep confusing the two), and why "lower rates" doesn't mean the same thing to all people — including why a Warsh Fed could theoretically deliver a cut to the Fed funds rate alongside higher mortgage rates.

We also get into the so-called "Chairman's Curse" — the eerie pattern of catastrophe that has marked nearly every Fed chair transition in modern history — and what event-day risk around FOMC meetings might look like under a chair who wants to communicate less, not more. Plus: Powell's surprising decision to stay on as a governor and the uncomfortable question nobody wants to ask out loud — if we're never going to take our medicine on the deficit, what is the role of the Federal Reserve actually supposed to be?

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In Part 3 of our Caesars Palace Coup series, we're back with Sujeet Indap of the Financial Times — co-author of the definitive book on the $30 billion LBO disaster — to connect the dots between 2008's creditor-on-creditor violence and the private credit tremors rattling markets right now. Caesars itself is back on the auction block, with Tilman Fertitta's Golden Nugget circling alongside a potential management buyout involving Tom Reeg and Carl Icahn. We dig into what a 2.0 deal would actually look like, why existing bondholders could get layered all over again, and how the Vici REIT spinoff reshaped the entire capital structure in ways most headlines completely miss when they quote the "$7 billion" offer price.

But the bigger story is what's happening across private credit broadly. In the last few weeks alone, Blue Owl permanently gated a perpetual fund, Blackstone partners had to backstop redemptions, and BlackRock, Cliffwater, and Apollo have all gated funds. We push Sujeet on the question every allocator is wrestling with: is this a contained correction or the early innings of something systemic? We get into why first-lien recoveries have collapsed, why loan-only capital structures and uni-tranche debt have changed what "senior secured" actually means, the PIK toggle canary that's quietly ticking up, and why the alt managers trading at 40x forward earnings may have priced in a growth story that's about to meet its first real credit cycle.

We also cover the fascinating bifurcation playing out in real time — record investment-grade issuance from Amazon, Honeywell, and others on one end, while BDCs gate retail investors on the other — and what it means for the push to get private credit into 401(k)s. Plus: the $80 million Wachtell-to-Kirkland lawyer poaching that Sujeet wrote about and why it might be the most underrated leading indicator of the next debt crisis.

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This is Part II of our Caesars Palace deep dive, and honestly, this is where things get truly unhinged. If Part I was the setup — the $30 billion LBO, the financial crisis, and the private equity firms scrambling to keep the lights on — this episode is the masterclass in what happens when the knives come out. We're breaking down the mechanics of distressed debt investing, restructuring, and bankruptcy. Above all, we'll explain how Apollo essentially invented a new playbook for stripping creditor rights that the entire industry now uses as standard operating procedure.

How do you move billions in assets out of a dying company and into a clean entity without the creditors being able to stop you? Who determines the value of what's being transferred when nobody is representing the other side? And how does Britney Spears end up at the literal center of a multibillion-dollar restructuring that kept this whole thing alive way longer than it should have survived?

And the biggest question of all (why we think this episode is mandatory listening right now): what happens when this playbook gets deployed AGAIN, today? We're already seeing the early signs: record levels of corporate debt coming due, earnings getting squeezed by higher rates, and redemption requests piling up. So what does creditor-on-creditor violence actually look like in practice? How do the alliances form and break? Why did the investors who got screwed the hardest in the Caesars saga end up being the biggest winners by the time the dust settled? And if you're sitting in any kind of debt instrument right now, how do you know whether you're the one holding the cards or the one about to get shut out in the cold?

Stay tuned for Part III, the conclusion of this 3-part series, where we'll be interviewing author and Financial Times reporter Sujeet Indap!

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Private credit is the crisis everyone's watching, but the real story -- and the one no one has been focused on -- is what private equity is doing behind the scenes.

In Part 1 of our 3-part series, Kristen and Jen break down the $30 billion leveraged buyout of Caesars by Apollo and TPG, the deal that became the blueprint for what we now call "creditor-on-creditor violence" and flipped everything everyone thought they knew about the relationship between debt and equity investors on its head.

This also happens to be the ultimate Private Equity & LBO deep dive as we start with the basics: what an LBO actually is, how it works, why private equity firms started to do club deals back in 2006/7 (hint...size) and how capital structures work at a high level.

From there, Jen and Kristen walk through the actual structure of the Caesars deal — $6B in equity from Apollo, TPG, and 30+ co-investors (everyone from Goldman Sachs to the Michael J. Fox Foundation to Bob Kraft), $7B in bank loans, $6B in bridge-to-high-yield bonds, and $6.5B in commercial mortgage-backed securities sitting at the PropCo level. They explain what an OpCo/PropCo mean in laymen's terms, why it let Apollo juice leverage, why club deals fell out of favor in favor of co-invest structures, and how today's mega-LBOs (Electronic Arts, the Ellison family's Warner Bros. Discovery play) stack up against what was historic in 2007.

This series is based on The Caesars Palace Coup by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes — not sponsored, just genuinely one of the best case studies out there on LBOs and distressed debt investing.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where Jen and Kristen get into everything that went wrong, the asset-transfer shenanigans, and the birth of creditor-on-creditor violence and how Britney Spears was the linchpin that kept it all together...until it all unraveled with the biggest names in investing, Apaloosa, Eliott, Oak Tree, Oak Hill, Paulson and more got in the ring.

In Part 3, we sit down with Sujeet Indap of the Financial Times to talk about what the Caesars deal means for the private credit market today, and what exactly is going on with Caesars who is back in the news with Carl Icahn and billionaire Tilman Fertitta out with competing offers.

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Buckle up, because this week we're sitting down with Neha Champaneria Markle, who runs the Private Equity Solutions group at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

Neha walks us through the entire private equity landscape and answers the questions you've been dying to ask an insider including:

- Is "AI is going to destroy software and therefore private equity"?
- Why are fundraising cycles getting longer?
- What does vintage year really tell you about a fund's performance?
- What's actually a "good" DPI, IRR, and TVPI
- Why does every fund somehow claim to be top quartile?

She also pulls back the curtain on subscription credit lines and how GPs use them to juice early IRRs, gives us a definition of "fund of funds" and "co-investment" that actually makes sense, and settles the score on whether PE investing is really just "volatility laundering".

As the walls around private equity are coming down, it’s important to understand which sectors are secretly crushing it, how managers actually get selected, the fee structures, and what the "democratization of private markets" really means for returns going forward.

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Everyone's been freaking out about oil and stocks, but the scariest thing this past week actually happened in bonds, and almost nobody was talking about it.

Last week the US Treasury held three auctions that were utter disasters, with dealer takedown more than double its 12-month average — worse than the tariff panic of April 2025. We get into what that means and why it matters.

Then we get into the viral Fortune Magazine article claiming the US Treasury declared the federal government insolvent. It did not... the numbers they used aren't wrong — but the way they used them is, and we explain why you simply cannot apply corporate accounting rules to a sovereign government that prints its own currency and has a military. That said, we're not letting Washington off the hook. The fiscal picture is broken and we get into why.

We wrap up with some of the wildest proposals circulating right now for how to fix the US debt problem — including one from self-proclaimed Bond King Jeffrey Gundlach that we're giving a hard pass. If you want the stuff that actually moves markets explained by people who used to sit on the desk, this is the episode.

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Private credit is all over the headlines — and all over your social media feed. Apollo just gated redemptions, Moody's stripped KKR's credit fund of its investment grade status, and Bill Maher is talking about it on late night TV. But what's actually going on beneath the panic? In this episode, we break down the alphabet soup of fund structures — publicly traded BDCs, private BDCs, interval funds — and explain why the vehicle you're invested in might matter just as much as what's inside it. What happens when you want your money back and the fund says no? And why are some managers bending over backward to meet redemptions while others are slamming the gate shut?

Then we dig into a question most people aren't asking: if stress is building in credit markets, who actually stands to benefit? We sit down with Fabian Chrobog, CIO and co-founder of NorthWall Capital, who has spent over two decades investing through crises from the GFC to European sovereign debt and beyond. He walks us through the difference between distressed investing, special situations, and what he calls "credit opportunities" — and why the rebranding isn't just cosmetic. What does it look like to run toward the fire when everyone else is heading for the exits, and why might the best opportunities take years to show up?

From the surprising world of lending against law firm case portfolios to the real reason "the distressed cycle is coming" has been the most overpromised trade of the last fifteen years, this conversation will change how you think about risk, liquidity, and where the smart money is actually going. Whether you're a retail investor trying to understand what your BDC actually is, or you just want to know why Wall Street keeps reinventing the same product with a new name — this one's for you.

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If you read the headlines about Private Credit, it feels like we're on the verge of another Global Financial Crisis. So, are we?
In this Private Credit "state of the union" episode, we break down the structural differences between today's private credit market and the pre-GFC banking system, why the "private" in private credit makes it so hard to know how deep the problems actually go, and whether the knock-on effects to pensions, banks, and public markets could make this everyone's problem even if most Americans don't have direct exposure.
We dig into the Blue Owl gating, redemption and markdown headlines at Blackstone and Blackrock, and what Boaz Weinstein's activist bid tells us about where these portfolios are actually worth. What's more, we ask whether the push to put private credit into 401(k)s and retail channels is democratizing wealth creation or backfilling institutional demand that's dried up. Plus: the "SaaSpocalypse" thesis, why Tuesday's record $66 billion day in IG bond issuance may be telling a very different story than private credit headlines, and more!

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