An investment arm of insurer Prudential Financial will buy up to $500 million of consumer loans from technology-backed consumer lender Affirm Holdings for a period of three years. Most of the loans come due in six months and Affirm will be able to re-lend the investment throughout the life of the deal, allowing it to finance $3 billion of buy-now-pay-later loans. The deal is part of a growing wave of transactions pairing a handful of large private-credit investors with financial technology companies that are replacing banks as go-to lenders for the American public.
The Yale endowment plans to offload about $2.5 billion of private equity stakes. Secondhand buyers had considered valuing pieces of the portfolio at a 15% haircut, though the overall discount is expected to be less than 10%.
US trade deficit fell to $61.6B in April, the lowest since Sept. 2023. Imports fell 16%, with consumer goods down 32%, driven by a $26B drop in pharmaceutical products. Exports rose 3% to a record $289.4B, possibly due to countries buying before retaliatory measures.
Private-equity firms are sitting on a record 29,000 companies worth $3.6 trillion, half of which they have owned for five years or more.
Private-equity funds have been holding on to past investments longer, drying up cash flow back to investors in those funds. This hinders the deployment of funds for new deals.
Publicly held federal debt stands at about $29 trillion, nearly double the level when Trump signed his original tax cut in 2017.
Among metropolitan areas especially reliant on higher education, three-quarters of them suffered weaker economic growth between 2011 and 2023 than the U.S. as a whole. In the prior decade, most of these same metro areas grew faster than the nation did.
The 401(k) giant Empower will start allowing private credit, equity and real estate in some of the accounts it administers later this year. The firm is expected to announce Wednesday that it has joined with seven firms to offer these investments.