Meta and xAI: Project Finance and Lease Accounting 101
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny $6.5 BILLION DOLLARS. That is roughly how much MORE Meta is paying to raise debt in the private credit market for their new AI data center vs. what they could have paid financing the data center in the traditional corporate credit market. So […]
No Foregone Conclusions: Is Jerome Powell Playing Hard to Get?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny It should have been a nothingburger of a Fed meeting. At the September FOMC meeting after cutting rates by 25bps, Powell described the Fed’s approach as one of “risk management”, suggesting that its next steps would be extremely data dependent. But with the […]
Apollo vs. First Brands: FAFO in the Credit World
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny One of our followers reached out this week with a great question. They’d seen a story in the FT about Apollo buying credit default swaps on First Brands, the company that has become a huge story in the private credit world due to […]
Is the Credit Market Finally Cracking?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny Two high-profile bankruptcies in the auto sector, Tricolor Auto Group and First Brands, have dominated headlines in recent weeks. These developments feel timely to us, as we’re currently reading The Credit Investor’s Handbook ahead of our conversation with author Michael Gatto on Restructuring […]
Gold is Trading at All Time Highs. Why Do People Invest in Gold in the First Place…and Why Now?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny You may have seen headlines recently that gold has hit an all-time high. Feels like a great time to talk about what it means to invest in gold, why investors oftentimes allocate some portion of their portfolios to it, and what’s happening right […]
Should We Ditch the Fed Funds Rate?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny Here’s why I don’t think this is a crazy idea… Dallas Fed Chair Lorie Logan made headlines last week suggesting that we should abandon the Federal Funds rate as the primary mechanism for monetary policy transmission. She’s not the first to suggest this […]
The EA Sports LBO: Why it feels familiar, yet totally different.
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny Kristen here, I walked onto the Morgan Stanley trading floor in 2007, the year KKR, TPG, and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners led what was then the largest leveraged buyout in history: TXU, the Texas utility later renamed Energy Future Holdings. The deal had […]
H-1B Visa Reform: 2009 All Over Again?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny Kristen here. When I joined Morgan Stanley in 2007, at the height of the then-credit boom, getting an H-1B visa was no small feat. What is an H1-B visa? The H-1B visa program allows foreign workers who are highly skilled in areas like […]
Trump Wants to Kill Quarterly Earnings: Good Idea or Just a Distraction?
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny President Trump recently floated the idea that (subject to SEC approval) public companies should no longer be required to report earnings four times a year. His proposal? Only twice a year. Many of you asked for our take. So, is this a smart […]
Sports Investing Deep Dive
By Jen Saarbach & Kristen Kelly, Co-Founders of The Wall Street Skinny The Business of Sports: Three Leagues, Three Models With the NFL season kicking off last week, and in honor of two recent episodes (our interview with A-Rod and our Moneyball analysis), this seemed to be a great week to finally cover Sports Teams […]