Scott Bessent is doing the OPPOSITE of what made him a fortune. Is it working?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny FX interventions explained…and graded. When it comes to Scott Bessent and the U.S. Treasury, the theme of the past 2 months has been “intervention”. Those with long memories point to Bessent’s earlier critiques of Janet Yellen, arguing that he’s employing the very same […]
How Will Anthropic Justify a $2 Trillion Valuation?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny The Best Explanation of AI Model Companies, How The Models Work, and Who Pays for What Anthropic and OpenAI are gearing up to go public. In anticipation of what’s expected to be (in Anthropic’s case) one of the largest IPOs of […]
How to Buy a $111 Billion Company When You’re Only Worth $25 Billion
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny Why Paramount Buying Warner Brothers Isn’t Typical M&A The insanity of the Paramount / Warner Brothers deal is best illustrated by the diagram below. How can Paramount — a $25bn firm — offer to pay $111bn to buy Warner Brothers? And how could […]
Why did Netflix Walk from Warner Bros? Here’s the M&A Math.
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny Netflix to Paramount: “Congratulations on Saying the Biggest Number, You F***ing Morons” Any M&A banker understands why Netflix walked despite only $1 separating their losing bid from Paramount’s winning bid. WHY? WHY didn’t Netflix counter when they seemed to be in […]
WTF Happened with Blue Owl?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny This past week we interviewed Goldman Sachs’s Head of Alts for Wealth, Kristin Olson (interview HERE), and asked her all the cynical questions you’ve asked us with regards to expanding private markets’ access to retail investors. She talked about how: Fees can […]
The Probability Machine
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny There’s an old joke on the trading floor: “What’s the difference between a Treasury trader and a swaps trader? Swaps traders can see the future.” The reality is, all interest rates trading at its core is a continuous referendum on what’s going […]
The Nikkei just hit an all-time high. What is happening?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny Japan’s stock market hasn’t been here since the bubble economy of the late 1980s. The Nikkei 225 and TOPIX have both surged to record highs, closing a chapter that investors called “three lost decades.” But this isn’t a single-catalyst story. […]
100 Year Bonds: The “Deal of the Century”?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny We got the following question in our fan mail: “Hi! My name is Bethany, I’m from Kansas City. I love listening to the podcast! I’m a future episode could you dive into all these corporate bonds? 100 year bonds in sterling?? […]
Elon Musk and the Art of Not Taking the L
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny Last March, we talked about Elon Musk’s X (the artist formerly known as Twitter) / xAI merger, and why the headline valuation didn’t really matter. The deal was all stock, both companies were private, and Elon had majority ownership in both companies. […]
What is the SaaSpocalypse?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny You’ve seen the headlines. It’s been a bad week for the tech sector. So what’s going on? Is this the long-awaited bursting of the AI-bubble? Or is this, in fact, the logical outcome of AI development thus far? Let’s discuss. When we […]