Finance & economics | Going for broke

Wall Street titans are betting big on insurers. What could go wrong?

How private-markets giants are overhauling the financial system

An illustration showing stacks of poker chips going up in size, with an indicator line going up and knocking over the top chips.
Illustration: George Wylesol

Blackstone listed on the New York Stock Exchange during the summer of 2007. Doing so just before the global financial crisis was hardly auspicious, and come early 2009 the firm’s shares had lost almost 90% of their value. By the time the two other members of America’s private-markets troika rang the bell, Wall Street had been battered. KKR listed on July 15th 2010, the same day Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, overhauling bank regulation. Apollo followed eight months later. Each firm told investors a similar story: private equity, the business of buying companies with debt, was their speciality.

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This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “In for a trillion”

From the January 27th 2024 edition

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