PPCC: Pisitófilos Creditófagos. Primavera 2025

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.eleconomista.es/opinion/noticias/13394922/06/25/las-consecuencias-de-un-dolar-debilitado.html

https://www.eleconomista.es/mercados-cotizaciones/noticias/13393733/06/25/el-carry-trade-socava-al-dolar-las-apuestas-contra-la-divisa-estan-en-maximos-de-2018.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.eleconomista.es/banca-finanzas/noticias/13395141/06/25/el-negocio-hipotecario-recupera-su-mejor-cota-en-dos-anos-con-las-bajadas-de-tipos.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.pressreader.com/spain/el-economista/20250603/page/17/textview

Domingo Zarzo Presidente de la Asociación Española de Desalación y Reutilización (AEDyR) “La desalación ha reducido su consumo energético un 90% en los últimos 60 años”

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.eleconomista.es/vivienda-inmobiliario/noticias/13393541/06/25/el-precio-del-alquiler-sube-un-99-en-mayo-y-marca-un-nuevo-record-vivir-en-barcelona-cuesta-mas-del-triple-que-en-ciudad-real.html

https://www.europapress.es/economia/noticia-proximo-julio-comenzara-funcionar-espana-registro-alquileres-corta-duracion-20250602122013.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.pressreader.com/spain/el-economista/20250603/page/29/textview

El gasto turístico de abril suma 10.826 millones y marca un récord histórico

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.eleconomista.es/economia/noticias/13394429/06/25/bruselas-amenaza-a-trump-con-aranceles-reciprocos-tras-anunciar-que-elevara-el-gravamen-al-acero-y-aluminio-al-50.html

Saludos.

[Elcasco]

https://x.com/SuburbanDrone/status/1929640099555561570

Pundits are saying the housing market is starting to implode. Prices are just starting to roll over, but supply is building.
https://qz.com/us-housing-market-mortgage-rates-supply-tariffs-economy-1851782951

This data is from FRED and it shows that the U.S. house price index adjusted for wages is higher than 2007. And it shows the supply of new homes (bottom pane) is the highest since 2009.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=1468689&rn=611

Oops we did it again.

[Derby]

https://www.ft.com/content/cbac2028-bc5a-41a5-867d-859028a9347c

How Blackstone and its biggest rivals are drifting apart

The largest private equity group is sticking to a fee-based approach, while Apollo and KKR embrace insurance-powered models


Blackstone, KKR and Apollo became big industry players using broadly similar strategies, but the past five years have marked a divergence that has not gone unnoticed by investors © FT montage/Getty

By the standards of Wall Street earnings calls, where executives are typically wary of commenting on politics or the businesses of their rivals, it was quite a barb.

“For some, ‘capital-light’ has become code for ‘heads we win, tails we win and hopefully our clients do OK’,” said Jim Zelter, president of Apollo Global Management, referring to a private equity business model that focuses mostly on running other people’s money in return for a fee.

It was a thinly veiled jibe at the company’s biggest rival, Blackstone, and its co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, who had earlier told his own shareholders that the $1tn-plus private investment group he had built was “an asset-light manager of third-party capital with minimal net debt and no insurance liabilities”. He added that this model was lower risk and gave the group “enormous flexibility to respond to changing conditions”.

The verbal jousting highlights a growing divergence in approach between the three leading groups in the $13tn private capital industry. It comes as private equity appears to be losing the momentum it enjoyed for decades, with many groups finding it harder to raise new money or struggling to exit existing investments.

Competitors that had long followed similar financial models have responded by creating very different structures that could be special weapons during tumultuous markets — or lead to unforeseen vulnerabilities.



Blackstone has opted to stick with the traditional approach of managing investors’ money for a fee, which is lower risk but requires it to continually source more funds to manage.

Apollo has harnessed its asset portfolio to the steady stream of income produced by an insurance operation — an approach that provides it with long-term capital, but introduces leverage and makes its finances more akin to those of a bank.

Buyouts pioneer KKR has also acquired a large insurer and embraced a strategy similar to the one employed by Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. It has invested in a growing portfolio of private companies whose asset values and earnings compound within the group, but at the risk of painful writedowns if the investee companies do not perform as expected.

“Everybody’s doing the same thing on the front of the house,” says an executive of one large private capital group, referring to the everyday dealmaking of large private capital groups. “It’s the back of the house where the differences emerge . . . and these are pretty radically different businesses.”

For much of the decades-long ascent of the private capital industry, its biggest players moved in lockstep. Blackstone, Apollo and KKR all trace their rise to the first wave of leveraged buyouts, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. 

KKR, founded in 1976 by Henry Kravis, George Roberts and the late Jerome Kohlberg, was the first to make large debt-funded corporate takeovers mainstream. Its success prompted two top bankers of that era, Schwarzman and the late Pete Peterson to ultimately focus Blackstone — founded in 1985 — away from advising corporate mergers and towards constructing large buyouts itself.


Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder and chief executive of Blackstone. The group says its fee-based business model is more transparent and predictable than that of its rivals © Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

Apollo co-founders Leon Black, Marc Rowan and Josh Harris all worked for Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king who pioneered the use of subinvestment grade debt to finance leveraged takeovers. In the early 1990s, after Milken’s Drexel Burnham Lambert investment bank collapsed, the trio snapped up Executive Life, an insurer reeling from its holding of junk bonds sold by Drexel years earlier. Their bet that the bonds would quickly recover paid off, leading to the creation of Apollo.

From the 1990s to the mid-2000s, the three groups followed the same playbook: attracting tens of billions in new assets, mostly on the back of high returns from private equity takeovers. Their large windfalls in the early 2000s contrasted with the losses suffered by venture capital firms and mutual funds during the dotcom bust, and earned them a reputation as some of Wall Street’s smartest managers. 

Blackstone led a drive to diversify its operations beyond buyouts and was the first to float in 2007, with KKR and Apollo following as markets recovered from the global financial crisis. After lacklustre early performance on public markets, their stock values soared as they grew increasingly diversified from originating private loans and investing in property and infrastructure. Starting in 2017, they all also restructured their operations so their shares could be included in the S&P 500 index.



Only after 2020 did their approaches start to dramatically alter. “It is post-pandemic where you are seeing the divergence and separation of the three business models more clearly,” says Michael Cyprys, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.

Blackstone’s approach means it is not directly on the hook for investors’ losses if its deals go sour or if markets head south. “I think the model is very well designed for periods of stress,” said Jonathan Gray, Schwarzman’s heir apparent, on the same earnings call. “[We] can weather a storm.”

It has also left the group with a net surplus of more than $7bn in cash and investments over debt. But critics say it means Blackstone has to keep coming back to investors for more funds, even if market conditions are not conducive to raising money or investing it. 

By contrast, Apollo has $395bn of assets on its balance sheet — mostly arising from the life insurance contracts its insurance business has promised to millions of retirement savers — backed by just $32bn of equity. The resulting asset leverage ratio of 12.2 times is comparable to banks such as JPMorgan, although rating agencies treat Apollo’s insurer and its asset manager as separate entities, with the former carrying around 10 times.


Pedestrians pass the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. KKR’s shares fell more than those of Blackstone in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s ‘liberation day’ in a sign of investors’ wariness © Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Apollo and KKR’s embrace of insurance assets and leverage stems from their belief that lucrative deals will be in increasingly short supply, leaving them needing to squeeze more from each investment they make as owners alongside their clients.

Blackstone has balked at owning an insurer over fears that its investment business would have to cover policyholder losses in the event of a market collapse, and the more onerous regulation that writing insurance brings. It also contends that a fee-based model is more transparent and predictable and that its shares will command a higher valuation. It allows Blackstone to pay out most of its profits in dividends, with Schwarzman having received billions in such payments.

“Done right, you should get more growth in a balance sheet heavy strategy,” says Cyprys.

“But investors historically have tended to favour capital-light business models from a valuation standpoint. You don’t have that principal risk and exposure.”

Apollo’s decision to combine its investing activity with an insurance operation was the brainchild of Rowan.

In 2009, he established Athene, named after the Greek goddess of wisdom, and began buying large tranches of policies for Apollo’s investors to manage. Athene paid fees to Apollo to uncover more complex investments that could earn solid yields in an environment of rock-bottom interest rates.



Apollo made early profits for Athene by purchasing distressed mortgages that quickly recovered. The group gradually increased its stake in Athene, which turned to originating loans to generate profits as debt markets recovered from the crisis. The fast-growing insurer floated in 2016.

But stock market investors never warmed to the opaque fee arrangements and when Rowan became chief executive in 2021 — after Black became enmeshed in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — his first big move was to merge Athene into Apollo.

Since then, Athene has roughly doubled its assets as Rowan builds what is in effect a bank, using longer-term insurance capital rather than flightier bank deposits to lend to investment-grade groups such as AT&T, AB InBev and Sony Music.

Apollo is on track to originate about a quarter of a trillion dollars in new loans this year — a figure that rivals megabanks such as Citigroup. Lending to commercial borrowers, rather than simply parking the premium income in more liquid but low-return assets, also allows it to generate a profitable spread over the largely fixed payouts that Athene has to make to its customers throughout their policies.

Apollo generates fees of about 1.4 per cent for each asset it originates, against just 0.4 per cent if it were to manage money for Athene on an arm’s-length basis. Rowan sees this as a safer model than funding low-rated buyout loans.


Marc Rowan, who became chief executive officer of Apollo in 2021, was behind the group’s move to combine its investing activity with an insurance business © Craig Hudson/Bloomberg

“If you believe that assets are in short supply you should want within a range to make as much money on each asset as possible,” he told shareholders last year. “You should want a fee, but you should also want a piece of the principal activity. That way, if I want to double my business, I don’t have to double the number of assets.”

But the model still comes with banklike risks. Athene has promised fixed returns on hundreds of billions of dollars in annuities policies that could come under pressure if interest rates drop or policyholders choose to terminate their contracts — and these assets now sit on the merged company’s balance sheet.

Last year Apollo arranged a $15bn hedge to protect against falling rates, and said that this and a deliberate exposure to shorter-term assets negate most of its interest-rate risk.

“Balance sheet intensity tends to have a more adverse mark to market risk,” notes William Katz, an analyst at TD Cowen.

Although it has nailed its colours to the mast of a fee-based model, Blackstone did consider the insurance option. In 2020, it considered buying a large minority stake in Global Atlantic alongside one of its largest investors.

The transaction would have given Blackstone control over its own insurer, rather than the asset management contracts it ultimately agreed with third-party insurers. But KKR — a group then roughly half Blackstone’s size by assets and market value — won the day thanks to its superior cash reserves, buying a majority stake in the insurer for more than $4bn. 

It was a vivid demonstration of KKR’s conglomerate approach, under which co-chief executives Scott Nuttall and Joe Bae use retained profits to invest in majority-controlled businesses to hold for the long term.

Global Atlantic’s assets and book value have more than doubled in just five years, making the deal a big winner. KKR has told investors that its strategic investments in 19 companies are set to pay out over $1bn in dividends annually by the end of the decade, creating a third earnings stream to supplement the fees it receives for managing money for institutions and the spread profits earned by Global Atlantic.

They also spread management risk. “Once companies, especially financial services companies, get to a $50bn market cap, their stock performance suffers,” Nuttall told shareholders last year. “When you have a lot of people, you get siloed. People start working not for the overall firm, but maybe for the group they’re in. Risk management suffers,” he added.



But in the event of a sharp downturn, KKR would have to write down the value of its subsidiary investments just like any other company. In April, when markets were rocked by the announcement of President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, KKR’s shares fell more than those of Blackstone — a sign of investors’ wariness.

“The concerns for Apollo and KKR have been around the negative earnings revisions around the insurance side of the operation,” says Katz, at TD Cowen. “For Blackstone, it is more about the fees they earn from realisation activity,” he adds, referring to the sales of assets that generate profits for investors and performance fees for Blackstone.

During the pandemic, Blackstone raised by far the most money of any private capital group on Wall Street, taking in nearly $270bn during 2021 alone.

The fundraising, likened by Schwarzman at the time to an “out of body experience”, was the reward for hiring hundreds of new salespeople to distribute Blackstone funds to wealthy individual investors in preceding years.

Executives believed this market could expand for decades, in time potentially becoming larger than the pension funds and endowments that had fuelled Blackstone’s initial growth.

The group’s assets and fee income outpaced those of its rivals as it put the cash to work. At one point, its market value was far greater than that of its two largest rivals combined, with Schwarzman receiving dividends of over $1bn in 2021.

Blackstone is asset light, but it has built a distribution engine that can sell products better than anyone else on Wall Street

Blackstone’s funds, such as its flagship evergreen property vehicle, Breit, promised investors large dividends. As the money flooded in during a decade of ultra-low interest rates, it had to be quickly recycled into assets, even if that carried the risk of overpaying.

Once interest rates began to rise rapidly in 2022, investors in Breit began to pull their cash out. Blackstone was forced to limit investor withdrawals to avert being forced to sell assets, and after a year-long campaign to calm their frightened investors, Schwarzman and Gray eventually stabilised Breit.

But the challenges were a reminder of the risks. “You can be the best real estate investor in the world — but if you take $50bn and invest it all on Tuesday in one interest rate environment, and rates go up, then everything you own is underwater,” says a top executive at another large private equity group. “Their sin was a sin of growth.”

Blackstone describes this as “a false premise”, noting that since the start of 2022 Breit has “materially outpaced” both publicly traded property funds and private real estate.

The head of another group says the Blackstone model is the one most susceptible to any change in public perceptions of its investment skill and its overall returns. “But their ballast is that they have invested in distribution. They are asset light, but they’ve built a distribution engine that can sell products better than anyone else on Wall Street.”

The contrasting business models of the private capital industry’s three titans will set the tone of the industry in the decades to come, as rivals such as EQT and CVC Capital in Europe and Blue Owl and TPG in the US decide which approach to adopt. 

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has also signalled its intention to expand in private markets and will face decisions about how to fund its growth.

An early indicator of the direction of travel could be the fate of Brighthouse, an insurer with $120bn in investments that put itself up for sale this year. It has received interest from several large private capital groups including TPG, Carlyle Group and Sixth Street.

For a group like TPG, any acquisition would suggest a move towards Apollo’s model, while remaining on the sidelines may indicate a preference for Blackstone’s approach of simply managing third-party assets.

“There are merits to both models and risks to both models,” says a top adviser to private capital groups. “Blackstone’s policy is a more conservative one. But is it overly conservative? Are they worrying too much about the black box risk in the insurance liabilities?”

Cyprys, at Morgan Stanley, also notes that the divergent strategies have yet to be tested by a prolonged recession or a sustained market crisis.

“There is still a question on how those business models will perform through a more meaningful downturn that we haven’t seen in many, many years,” he says.

[Derby]

https://www.ft.com/content/a348fd6e-cfc4-41e7-a37a-1786495d8538

It’s time for the second draft of globalisation Larry Fink

Capital markets need to be better attuned to individual countries’ goals and the interests of workers


A former industrial building in the rustbelt state of Ohio. Markets can work not only in the service of large institutions, but also the factory workers left behind by globalisation © Louis Delbarre/Hans Lucas/Reuters

The global economy is in a strange place: we know more about the next seven years than the next seven days.

For nearly two months, I’ve been travelling around the world and hearing the same question: what’s going to happen with tariffs? There are only guesses. The worst-case scenario is bleak: supply shocks, spiralling inflation, economic slowdown. But at this point, the guessing itself has become a commodity, priced in, speculated to death, endlessly churned through headlines.

That’s the seven-day story. The seven-year story is quieter, but far more consequential. 

The Trump administration’s tariffs are the symptom of a backlash to the era of what might be called “globalism without guardrails”. Global GDP grew more since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 than in all recorded history before it. But the benefits weren’t evenly shared. S&P 500 investors saw a return of more than 3,800 per cent. Rustbelt workers did not.

So it’s no surprise that this model of globalisation is now coming apart. But its proposed replacement — economic nationalism behind sealed borders — isn’t any more convincing.

The real question here is what replaces the model that led us to this point. And the answer is coming into focus. It’s neither globalism nor protectionism, but a blend: open markets with national goals — and workers — in mind.

At the heart of this new model are the capital markets: exchanges where people invest in stocks, bonds, infrastructure, everything. Why? Because markets are uniquely suited to transforming global growth into local wealth — even though, historically, that hasn’t always happened. 

Under globalisation, money often chased returns around the world without necessarily benefiting the people back home. We should still want capital to move freely towards opportunity — that’s what makes markets efficient. But that doesn’t mean countries can’t steer more of that capital home. 

In a more nationally attuned model, markets channel citizens’ savings into local businesses and infrastructure. The gains flow back to people, helping them afford homes, education, retirement. Put simply: people will fuel their country’s economic growth, and own a piece of it.   

The first step? Helping more people become investors. This is the deeper shift I’m seeing in the economy. Governments are rethinking whom markets are for. For decades, they primarily served countries’ wealthiest citizens and largest institutions. Now, countries are democratising markets recognising that the same factory worker left behind by globalisation can be an investor, too.

Take Japan. Until recently, it had no tax-incentivised way to invest for retirement. Now its Nisa programme is booming — enrolment surpassed 25mn last year. Meanwhile, lawmakers in the US are weighing a market-based twist on baby bonds: an investment account for every American at birth. Even a modest deposit could grow, by the age of 50, into a retirement cushion or college fund.

But creating more investors is only half the battle. Every market has two sides: the people who invest, and the places where capital gets put to work. Ensuring it’s put to work domestically is hard, and in Europe, for instance, it has triggered an economic reckoning. 

Capital can’t fuel growth if it’s trapped in bureaucracy. Yet the EU operates under 27 different legal systems. And even if you navigate that red tape and decide to invest — say, in an energy company — it can take 13 years just to permit a power line. You might back that project to meet soaring demand from data centres, but if those centres are training artificial intelligence, it triggers an entirely new layer of regulation. The result is paralysis. Europeans save more than three times as much of their income as Americans, but invest far less of it. 

However, the ground in Europe is shifting. There’s growing momentum to remove the barriers holding capital back: faster permitting, less red tape on AI, a single regulatory framework instead of 27, and, most critically, a true savings and investments union. If I were an EU politician, that union would be my top priority. Investors will be watching closely to see if the reforms stick. 

Of course, expanding markets won’t fix everything. Unchecked, financialisation can fuel inequality. That was the first draft of globalisation: enormous wealth, unevenly distributed, with little thought for who benefited — or where. What’s emerging now is globalisation’s second draft, a re-globalisation built not just to generate prosperity, but to aim it towards the people and places left behind the first time. 

[Nuss]

https://www.ft.com/content/cbac2028-bc5a-41a5-867d-859028a9347c

How Blackstone and its biggest rivals are drifting apart

The largest private equity group is sticking to a fee-based approach, while Apollo and KKR embrace insurance-powered models


Blackstone, KKR and Apollo became big industry players using broadly similar strategies, but the past five years have marked a divergence that has not gone unnoticed by investors © FT montage/Getty

By the standards of Wall Street earnings calls, where executives are typically wary of commenting on politics or the businesses of their rivals, it was quite a barb.

“For some, ‘capital-light’ has become code for ‘heads we win, tails we win and hopefully our clients do OK’,” said Jim Zelter, president of Apollo Global Management, referring to a private equity business model that focuses mostly on running other people’s money in return for a fee.

It was a thinly veiled jibe at the company’s biggest rival, Blackstone, and its co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, who had earlier told his own shareholders that the $1tn-plus private investment group he had built was “an asset-light manager of third-party capital with minimal net debt and no insurance liabilities”. He added that this model was lower risk and gave the group “enormous flexibility to respond to changing conditions”.

The verbal jousting highlights a growing divergence in approach between the three leading groups in the $13tn private capital industry. It comes as private equity appears to be losing the momentum it enjoyed for decades, with many groups finding it harder to raise new money or struggling to exit existing investments.

Competitors that had long followed similar financial models have responded by creating very different structures that could be special weapons during tumultuous markets — or lead to unforeseen vulnerabilities.



Blackstone has opted to stick with the traditional approach of managing investors’ money for a fee, which is lower risk but requires it to continually source more funds to manage.

Apollo has harnessed its asset portfolio to the steady stream of income produced by an insurance operation — an approach that provides it with long-term capital, but introduces leverage and makes its finances more akin to those of a bank.

Buyouts pioneer KKR has also acquired a large insurer and embraced a strategy similar to the one employed by Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. It has invested in a growing portfolio of private companies whose asset values and earnings compound within the group, but at the risk of painful writedowns if the investee companies do not perform as expected.

“Everybody’s doing the same thing on the front of the house,” says an executive of one large private capital group, referring to the everyday dealmaking of large private capital groups. “It’s the back of the house where the differences emerge . . . and these are pretty radically different businesses.”

For much of the decades-long ascent of the private capital industry, its biggest players moved in lockstep. Blackstone, Apollo and KKR all trace their rise to the first wave of leveraged buyouts, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

KKR, founded in 1976 by Henry Kravis, George Roberts and the late Jerome Kohlberg, was the first to make large debt-funded corporate takeovers mainstream. Its success prompted two top bankers of that era, Schwarzman and the late Pete Peterson to ultimately focus Blackstone — founded in 1985 — away from advising corporate mergers and towards constructing large buyouts itself.


Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder and chief executive of Blackstone. The group says its fee-based business model is more transparent and predictable than that of its rivals © Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

Apollo co-founders Leon Black, Marc Rowan and Josh Harris all worked for Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king who pioneered the use of subinvestment grade debt to finance leveraged takeovers. In the early 1990s, after Milken’s Drexel Burnham Lambert investment bank collapsed, the trio snapped up Executive Life, an insurer reeling from its holding of junk bonds sold by Drexel years earlier. Their bet that the bonds would quickly recover paid off, leading to the creation of Apollo.

From the 1990s to the mid-2000s, the three groups followed the same playbook: attracting tens of billions in new assets, mostly on the back of high returns from private equity takeovers. Their large windfalls in the early 2000s contrasted with the losses suffered by venture capital firms and mutual funds during the dotcom bust, and earned them a reputation as some of Wall Street’s smartest managers.

Blackstone led a drive to diversify its operations beyond buyouts and was the first to float in 2007, with KKR and Apollo following as markets recovered from the global financial crisis. After lacklustre early performance on public markets, their stock values soared as they grew increasingly diversified from originating private loans and investing in property and infrastructure. Starting in 2017, they all also restructured their operations so their shares could be included in the S&P 500 index.



Only after 2020 did their approaches start to dramatically alter. “It is post-pandemic where you are seeing the divergence and separation of the three business models more clearly,” says Michael Cyprys, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.

Blackstone’s approach means it is not directly on the hook for investors’ losses if its deals go sour or if markets head south. “I think the model is very well designed for periods of stress,” said Jonathan Gray, Schwarzman’s heir apparent, on the same earnings call. “[We] can weather a storm.”

It has also left the group with a net surplus of more than $7bn in cash and investments over debt. But critics say it means Blackstone has to keep coming back to investors for more funds, even if market conditions are not conducive to raising money or investing it.

By contrast, Apollo has $395bn of assets on its balance sheet — mostly arising from the life insurance contracts its insurance business has promised to millions of retirement savers — backed by just $32bn of equity. The resulting asset leverage ratio of 12.2 times is comparable to banks such as JPMorgan, although rating agencies treat Apollo’s insurer and its asset manager as separate entities, with the former carrying around 10 times.


Pedestrians pass the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. KKR’s shares fell more than those of Blackstone in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s ‘liberation day’ in a sign of investors’ wariness © Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Apollo and KKR’s embrace of insurance assets and leverage stems from their belief that lucrative deals will be in increasingly short supply, leaving them needing to squeeze more from each investment they make as owners alongside their clients.

Blackstone has balked at owning an insurer over fears that its investment business would have to cover policyholder losses in the event of a market collapse, and the more onerous regulation that writing insurance brings. It also contends that a fee-based model is more transparent and predictable and that its shares will command a higher valuation. It allows Blackstone to pay out most of its profits in dividends, with Schwarzman having received billions in such payments.

“Done right, you should get more growth in a balance sheet heavy strategy,” says Cyprys.

“But investors historically have tended to favour capital-light business models from a valuation standpoint. You don’t have that principal risk and exposure.”

Apollo’s decision to combine its investing activity with an insurance operation was the brainchild of Rowan.

In 2009, he established Athene, named after the Greek goddess of wisdom, and began buying large tranches of policies for Apollo’s investors to manage. Athene paid fees to Apollo to uncover more complex investments that could earn solid yields in an environment of rock-bottom interest rates.



Apollo made early profits for Athene by purchasing distressed mortgages that quickly recovered. The group gradually increased its stake in Athene, which turned to originating loans to generate profits as debt markets recovered from the crisis. The fast-growing insurer floated in 2016.

But stock market investors never warmed to the opaque fee arrangements and when Rowan became chief executive in 2021 — after Black became enmeshed in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — his first big move was to merge Athene into Apollo.

Since then, Athene has roughly doubled its assets as Rowan builds what is in effect a bank, using longer-term insurance capital rather than flightier bank deposits to lend to investment-grade groups such as AT&T, AB InBev and Sony Music.

Apollo is on track to originate about a quarter of a trillion dollars in new loans this year — a figure that rivals megabanks such as Citigroup. Lending to commercial borrowers, rather than simply parking the premium income in more liquid but low-return assets, also allows it to generate a profitable spread over the largely fixed payouts that Athene has to make to its customers throughout their policies.

Apollo generates fees of about 1.4 per cent for each asset it originates, against just 0.4 per cent if it were to manage money for Athene on an arm’s-length basis. Rowan sees this as a safer model than funding low-rated buyout loans.


Marc Rowan, who became chief executive officer of Apollo in 2021, was behind the group’s move to combine its investing activity with an insurance business © Craig Hudson/Bloomberg

“If you believe that assets are in short supply you should want within a range to make as much money on each asset as possible,” he told shareholders last year. “You should want a fee, but you should also want a piece of the principal activity. That way, if I want to double my business, I don’t have to double the number of assets.”

But the model still comes with banklike risks. Athene has promised fixed returns on hundreds of billions of dollars in annuities policies that could come under pressure if interest rates drop or policyholders choose to terminate their contracts — and these assets now sit on the merged company’s balance sheet.

Last year Apollo arranged a $15bn hedge to protect against falling rates, and said that this and a deliberate exposure to shorter-term assets negate most of its interest-rate risk.

“Balance sheet intensity tends to have a more adverse mark to market risk,” notes William Katz, an analyst at TD Cowen.

Although it has nailed its colours to the mast of a fee-based model, Blackstone did consider the insurance option. In 2020, it considered buying a large minority stake in Global Atlantic alongside one of its largest investors.

The transaction would have given Blackstone control over its own insurer, rather than the asset management contracts it ultimately agreed with third-party insurers. But KKR — a group then roughly half Blackstone’s size by assets and market value — won the day thanks to its superior cash reserves, buying a majority stake in the insurer for more than $4bn.

It was a vivid demonstration of KKR’s conglomerate approach, under which co-chief executives Scott Nuttall and Joe Bae use retained profits to invest in majority-controlled businesses to hold for the long term.

Global Atlantic’s assets and book value have more than doubled in just five years, making the deal a big winner. KKR has told investors that its strategic investments in 19 companies are set to pay out over $1bn in dividends annually by the end of the decade, creating a third earnings stream to supplement the fees it receives for managing money for institutions and the spread profits earned by Global Atlantic.

They also spread management risk. “Once companies, especially financial services companies, get to a $50bn market cap, their stock performance suffers,” Nuttall told shareholders last year. “When you have a lot of people, you get siloed. People start working not for the overall firm, but maybe for the group they’re in. Risk management suffers,” he added.



But in the event of a sharp downturn, KKR would have to write down the value of its subsidiary investments just like any other company. In April, when markets were rocked by the announcement of President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, KKR’s shares fell more than those of Blackstone — a sign of investors’ wariness.

“The concerns for Apollo and KKR have been around the negative earnings revisions around the insurance side of the operation,” says Katz, at TD Cowen. “For Blackstone, it is more about the fees they earn from realisation activity,” he adds, referring to the sales of assets that generate profits for investors and performance fees for Blackstone.

During the pandemic, Blackstone raised by far the most money of any private capital group on Wall Street, taking in nearly $270bn during 2021 alone.

The fundraising, likened by Schwarzman at the time to an “out of body experience”, was the reward for hiring hundreds of new salespeople to distribute Blackstone funds to wealthy individual investors in preceding years.

Executives believed this market could expand for decades, in time potentially becoming larger than the pension funds and endowments that had fuelled Blackstone’s initial growth.

The group’s assets and fee income outpaced those of its rivals as it put the cash to work. At one point, its market value was far greater than that of its two largest rivals combined, with Schwarzman receiving dividends of over $1bn in 2021.

Blackstone is asset light, but it has built a distribution engine that can sell products better than anyone else on Wall Street

Blackstone’s funds, such as its flagship evergreen property vehicle, Breit, promised investors large dividends. As the money flooded in during a decade of ultra-low interest rates, it had to be quickly recycled into assets, even if that carried the risk of overpaying.

Once interest rates began to rise rapidly in 2022, investors in Breit began to pull their cash out. Blackstone was forced to limit investor withdrawals to avert being forced to sell assets, and after a year-long campaign to calm their frightened investors, Schwarzman and Gray eventually stabilised Breit.

But the challenges were a reminder of the risks. “You can be the best real estate investor in the world — but if you take $50bn and invest it all on Tuesday in one interest rate environment, and rates go up, then everything you own is underwater,” says a top executive at another large private equity group. “Their sin was a sin of growth.”

Blackstone describes this as “a false premise”, noting that since the start of 2022 Breit has “materially outpaced” both publicly traded property funds and private real estate.

The head of another group says the Blackstone model is the one most susceptible to any change in public perceptions of its investment skill and its overall returns. “But their ballast is that they have invested in distribution. They are asset light, but they’ve built a distribution engine that can sell products better than anyone else on Wall Street.”

The contrasting business models of the private capital industry’s three titans will set the tone of the industry in the decades to come, as rivals such as EQT and CVC Capital in Europe and Blue Owl and TPG in the US decide which approach to adopt.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has also signalled its intention to expand in private markets and will face decisions about how to fund its growth.

An early indicator of the direction of travel could be the fate of Brighthouse, an insurer with $120bn in investments that put itself up for sale this year. It has received interest from several large private capital groups including TPG, Carlyle Group and Sixth Street.

For a group like TPG, any acquisition would suggest a move towards Apollo’s model, while remaining on the sidelines may indicate a preference for Blackstone’s approach of simply managing third-party assets.

“There are merits to both models and risks to both models,” says a top adviser to private capital groups. “Blackstone’s policy is a more conservative one. But is it overly conservative? Are they worrying too much about the black box risk in the insurance liabilities?”

Cyprys, at Morgan Stanley, also notes that the divergent strategies have yet to be tested by a prolonged recession or a sustained market crisis.

“There is still a question on how those business models will perform through a more meaningful downturn that we haven’t seen in many, many years,” he says.

¿Se está dilucidando aquí cuál es el Lehman Brothers de esta crisis? Si lo entiendo bien, Blackstone ha sido más «prudente» que KKR y Apollo y quedaría más protegido (Blackstone terminaría siendo el protegido/protector del resto, el JPMorgan). Si esta tesis es correcta, el lado asegurador del negocio de estos últimos es lo que debería actuar como canario en la mina.

Un saludo.

P.D: Muchas gracias, Derby.

[Benzino Napaloni]

Hacia la extinción de las viviendas en alquiler: ¿Dónde han ido a parar las 150.000 casas que se han evaporado del mercado?
El inventario de propiedades disponibles en todo el país baja de forma exponencial y casi todos en el sector señalan un momento de inflexión: la Ley de Vivienda

https://www.elmundo.es/economia/vivienda/2025/06/01/682ef956fdddff8e6d8b458e.html

Si se animan, échenle un vistazo a los comentarios de la noticia. Cientos de "si no lo alquilo (al precio que quiero), lo vendo" y algunos que dicen dejarlas cerradas a la espera de tiempos "mejores". Qué curioso que todos los que comentan ahí tengan (o afirmen tener) varias viviendas en propiedad.

Lo mejor es que piensen que la Ley de Vivienda está siendo un fracaso si justamente está consiguiendo que pongan sus viviendas a la venta. El siguiente paso será cuando se den cuenta que a esos precios no las va a comprar nadie... ¿Volverán a ponerlas en alquiler? 

Hay quien tiene colchón suficiente como para tener los tochos vacíos bastante tiempo.

Los que tienen el problema gordo son los que se han apalancado y metido recientemente.

¿Recuerdan la turra que se formó hace tres años cuando subió el Euribor? Ahí más de un casero armó la guerra de Troya porque calculó la hipoteca para que el bicho la pagase sola. Y con la LAU en la mano, mientras el contrato está en vigencia la revisión está limitada a la inflación. Y más de uno en vez de cobrar un extra empezó a perder dinero.


Por supuesto que se han olvidado las lecciones de 2009 y por ahí, cuando salió el "si no lo vendo lo alquilo". El premio de consolación, recuerden ese concepto. Ahora que no pueden alquilar a su antojo, vuelven a la venta. Y sí, estará por ver a dónde van cuando vean que no pueden vender si no es a pérdidas, ni alquilar a precios de locura o contratos por meses.

[Fomento Cemento]

Horo puro:

https://www.elmundo.es/madrid/2025/06/02/683dfd7be4d4d8d94a8b457e.html

29 familias desalojadas de sus viviendas por el Gobierno: "El que nos echa de nuestras casas no es un fondo buitre, sino el Ejecutivo de Sánchez"
Residen en pisos de alquiler de la Tesorería de la Seguridad Social, que les ha anunciado que tienen que dejar sus casas el 31 de julio

Ana del Barrio | Madrid
03/06/2025 00:06

Las cartas certificadas empezaron a llegar como un mazazo en abril del año pasado: «Ponemos en su conocimiento que el contrato formalizado por ustedes con la Sociedad Pública de Alquiler S. A. en 2011 ha finalizado y se encuentra en tácita reconducción, haciendo constar que es voluntad de esta Tesorería General de la Seguridad Social poner término al mismo».
Máximo Peña y su pareja María Montes entraron en shock cuando, después de llevar 18 años residiendo de alquiler en viviendas de la Tesorería de la Seguridad Social, este organismo les anunció que no les iba a renovar el contrato y les instaba a abandonar sus residencias.
Como ellos, cerca de 30 familias afectadas no daban crédito a que les desalojasen, porque a diferencia de las cientos de personas desahuciadas en este país, en este caso su casero era el Gobierno y pagan religiosamente sus alquileres de unos 900 euros al mes para un piso de dos dormitorios o 1.200 euros con tres habitaciones.
«Si te amenaza con desahuciarte un fondo buitre entra dentro de lo previsible, pero cuando el Estado actúa como un fondo buitre es una aberración. El que nos echa a la calle es el Ejecutivo de Pedro Sánchez», declara Peña, portavoz de la Plataforma de Familias Desahuciadas por la Seguridad Social.

La medida estrella de Zapatero
Peña se lamenta además de que precisamente sea un Gobierno socialista el que vaya a dar la última puntilla a una de las iniciativas estrellas del Ejecutivo de José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
El ex presidente socialista creó en 2005 la Sociedad Pública del Alquiler, una idea que ahora pretende rescatar Sánchez, quien a su vez ha anunciado la creación de una empresa pública para gestionar y construir casas.
La idea de Zapatero era dinamizar el mercado del alquiler y facilitar el acceso de la vivienda a los jóvenes. Las familias que ahora van a ser desalojadas fueron las beneficiarias de ese programa y lograron pisos de alquiler a precios a asequibles en barrios céntricos de Madrid, como Lavapiés, Argüelles, Ventas o Pacífico.

«Lo más sangrante es que van a acabar con algo que funciona y que fue de su propia creación. Somos el ejemplo de que con políticas sociales, personas trabajadoras normales pueden vivir en el centro y ahora quieren que nos convirtamos en parte del problema en medio de una crisis de la vivienda sangrante. Nos sentimos maltratados como ciudadanos que pagamos impuestos y creemos en la política», se queja Óscar Amores, en su piso de Lavapiés.

Los vecinos llevan 18 años pagando el alquiler.
Por eso, critica la «hipocresía del Gobierno» que de cara a la galería mantiene el discurso de fomentar el alquiler asequible y luego hace justo lo contrario con sus propios inmuebles. «¿Cómo es posible que la Seguridad Social dé por finalizados nuestros contratos sin ofrecernos ninguna otra alternativa, salvo adquirir la vivienda a precios abusivos?», se preguntan los perjudicados.

A su juicio, esta medida contribuye a fomentar la especulación inmobiliaria que tanto critica el Ejecutivo de Sánchez. «Cuando estas casas salen a subasta o la puja queda desierta o se las quedan las grandes promotoras inmobiliarias, que luego las venden a precios astronómicos o las trocean en habitaciones para el alquiler turístico. Nuestros pisos van a acabar alimentando esa rueda diabólica que el Gobierno denuncia», censura Montes.

874 casas vacías
Los afectados denuncian además que la Seguridad Social tiene cientos de pisos vacíos en toda España, pero justo se plantea enajenar aquellos en los que residen inquilinos y que son los únicos que no generan pérdidas.
Según un informe de Fiscalización del Tribunal de Cuentas, la Tesorería de la Seguridad Social contaba en 2019 con 4.115 inmuebles en toda España, de los que el 21% (874) estaban totalmente vacíos, mientras que el 4% (179) lo estaban parcialmente.

En este informe del año 2022, el Tribunal de Cuentas dio un tirón de orejas a la Seguridad Social por no tener el inventario de bienes inmuebles actualizado y criticó su actuación «poco eficiente», ya que la existencia de todas esas viviendas vacías supone un coste 143 millones de euros a las arcas del Estado.

También reprobó que no cumpliese el Plan de Racionalización del Patrimonio Inmobiliario de la Administración, cuyo objetivo es «la movilización de los inmuebles ociosos a través de su utilización o de su enajenación».
Según destacan los vecinos, este plan priorizaba la movilización de las casas ociosas, es decir, las que no estaban habitadas y no entienden por qué si hay tantas viviendas vacías empiecen a desalojar las suyas.
Por ejemplo, en el edificio de la calle Mallorca del barrio de Lavapiés, había alquiladas 20 viviendas de la Seguridad Social y ahora sólo quedan tres familias. Los otros 17 pisos permanecen cerrados y en estado de abandono.
Las familias damnificadas han pedido en varias ocasiones reuniones con los responsables del ramo para buscar una solución colectiva sin tener ningún éxito.

Contratos vencidos
El Ministerio de Inclusión, Seguridad Social y Migraciones argumenta que desde 2022 está tomando medidas para lograr una mejor gestión de su patrimonio, siguiendo las recomendaciones del Tribunal de Cuentas.
Además, alega que un informe del Servicio Jurídico de la Seguridad Social dictaminó que los contratos suscritos con la Sociedad Pública del Alquiler están vencidos.
En su opinión, la única solución es ofrecer a los inquilinos la opción de venderles las casas, una posibilidad que la mayoría ha rechazado debido a que los pisos se han tasado en precios de mercado, que oscilan entre 500.000 y un millón de euros.
Los contratos de las personas damnificadas se firmaron en 2006 y tenían la duración de un año, que se prorrogaba obligatoriamente durante cinco años.

Transcurrido ese lapso de tiempo, la Sociedad Pública del Alquiler notificó por burofax a 100 familias la finalización de los contratos y que si querían renovar tenían que aceptar una subida de entre el 19% y el 30%, según el caso. Ante este aumento del alquiler, muchos inquilinos abandonaran sus hogares, por lo que se quedaron vacíos durante una década, hasta que comenzó el proceso de subasta.

Siete años después de su creación, la Sociedad Pública del Alquiler inició su proceso de disolución, tras una gestión ineficaz e incluso «negligente», según denunció el Tribunal de Cuentas, que generó unas pérdidas de 53 millones de euros.

Los afectados tuvieron que cambiar de casero, ya que en marzo de 2013, la Tesorería General de la Seguridad Social se subrogó a los contratos de arrendamiento de esas viviendas, que en su día habían sido cedidas a la Sociedad Pública del Alquiler. La Tesorería fue revisando la renta cada año hasta que en abril de 2024 decidió poner término a los contratos.

Los afectados viven en vilo desde entonces porque ya les han llegado nuevas cartas que les emplazan a abandonar sus casas el 31 de julio o el 30 de noviembre: «Tenemos los días contados y no podemos entender la incoherencia del Gobierno, que contradice de manera brutal su propio discurso. Cuando vas a perder tu vivienda, pierdes tu vida», concluyen.

[neutron_mortgages]

Hay quien tiene colchón suficiente como para tener los tochos vacíos bastante tiempo.

Pues esa acaparación especulativa si que no debería ser demasiado complicado desincentivarla. La situación lo justifica de sobra si este desmadre de la vivienda se va a cargar el capitalismo, ¿no?

[sudden and sharp]

Este número total de desempleados es la cifra más baja en un mes de mayo desde que hay registros. Desde el inicio de la serie histórica comparable, en 1996, el paro ha bajado en mayo la mayoría de veces en Extremadura (26 veces) mientras que ha subido en cuatro ocasiones, siendo el descenso del último mes la bajada más pequeña desde 2009.

En el último año el desempleo acumula un descenso de 5.119 parados, lo que supone un 6,9 por ciento menos.

 


El paro baja en 2.034 personas en mayo en Extremadura hasta los 68.635 desempleados
https://www.eleconomista.es/empleo/noticias/13395700/06/25/el-paro-baja-en-2034-personas-en-mayo-en-extremadura-hasta-los-68635-desempleados.html

[Benzino Napaloni]

Hay quien tiene colchón suficiente como para tener los tochos vacíos bastante tiempo.

Pues esa acaparación especulativa si que no debería ser demasiado complicado desincentivarla. La situación lo justifica de sobra si este desmadre de la vivienda se va a cargar el capitalismo, ¿no?

Ya hay tímidos pero crecientes impuestos a la vivienda vacía. Que se expulse a la población residente y las empresas y las ciudades se queden sin trabajadores es el único susto que les puede forzar a exigir poner en uso las viviendas existentes.