2026-04-07
7 分钟Hello, Alice Fullwood here, co-host of Money Talks, our weekly podcast on markets, the economy and business.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Thanks for listening.
Now investors are demanding their money back,
and regulators are worried about panic spreading across the financial system,
just as it faces a shock from President Donald Trump's war in the Middle East.
The good news is that Wall Street is much further from the precipice than many fear.
Yet all should be concerned by the ineptitude displayed by some of its fastest-growing firms
and the costs their woes could impose on others.
Over the past two decades, the biggest private equity houses have gone from mostly buying
and selling companies to lending to them.
In the process, they have become massive.
Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle and KKR manage $3.4 trillion of assets, compared with $800 billion a decade ago.
Their lending has often stayed close to home.
Much of private credit involves funding private equity deals.
And of the roughly $1.5 trillion of private loans that are outstanding,
around a third sits in funds open to individual investors.
At first, investors in these funds were spooked by the realisation that nearly a third of their loans
are to software firms, which could be disrupted by artificial intelligence.