The Festival of Words: From Gyles Brandreth to Anthony Scaramucci – all you need to know about the Fleet Street Quarter festival
UK fintech Pockit borrows cash from Spanish railway architect March 17, 2026 Pockit has borrowed money from an award-winning Spanish railway architect in one of the most unusual debt raises completed by a British fintech. The Cardiff-based business, which offers prepaid accounts to customers without a credit score, has signed a debenture agreement with Anchorgate Management, a British Virgin Islands company controlled by architect Santiago Calatrava, company [...]
JP Morgan marks down private credit loans amid AI jitters March 11, 2026 JP Morgan has marked down the value of specific loans held by private-credit groups, tightening its grip on the sector as boss Jamie Dimon warns of a looming AI reckoning. The bank’s move specifically targets software companies, which it now views as highly vulnerable to being replaced by artificial intelligence. By devaluing these assets, JP [...]
Blackstone’s private credit fund hands investors record redemptions March 3, 2026 The world’s largest alternative asset manager is allowing investors to pull a record amount of cash from its flagship private credit fund as anxiety continues to ripple through the trillion-dollar industry. Blackstone will permit investors to redeem 7.9 per cent of shares from the fund – the equivalent to a whopping $3.8bn. The financial giant [...]
Ex Goldman chief: I smell another financial crisis March 2, 2026 Goldman Sachs’ top boss throughout the 2008 financial crisis has sounded the alarm that the global economy was drawing closer to another crash. Billionaire investment banker Lloyd Blankfein, who served at the helm of Goldman from 2006 until 2018, said: “I don’t feel the storm, but the horses are starting to whinny in the corral.” [...]
Private equity run of barren returns worse than in run-up to 2008 February 23, 2026 Private equity funds returned fewer profits to investors for a record fourth year running in 2025, according to a report from industry juggernaut Bain & Co which warned that fundraising for new funds had become a “slow and difficult slog”. Distributions as a percentage of net asset value (NAV), which denotes how much private equity [...]
Hamilton Lane’s Erik Hirsch: We’re seeing a private credit witch hunt February 17, 2026 Depending on which central banking chief you talk to, the burgeoning private credit industry is either a cause of insomnia, a “dark corner” of finance or an arcane lending practice whose participants are behaving like bankers in the run-up to the global financial crisis. To Hamilton Lane boss Erik Hirsch, though, it is simply an [...]
Nscale bags $1.4bn loan as AI infrastructure shifts to private credit February 13, 2026 London-based AI cloud provider Nscale has secured a $1.4bn (£1.03bn) delayed draw term loan backed by GPUs, in one of the largest private credit deals yet tied directly to AI hardware deployments in Europe. The facility was led by funds managed by Pimco, Blue Owl and LuminArx Capital Management, with support from additional asset managers [...]
Quality over quantity: UK M&A volume slips but deal value climbs February 4, 2026 UK merger and acquisition deal value increased last year despite a fall in volumes as investors turned their focus to acquiring fewer, higher-quality assets. The total number of UK deals fell 12 per cent year on year to 2,991, down from 3,411 in 2024, according to the latest industry trends data from PwC. But overall [...]
Private markets suffer ‘reality check’ as fundraising dries up February 3, 2026 Private markets fundraising fell to a decade low across Europe in 2025, after a slowdown in dealmaking and stuttering performance led major buyout shops to struggle to return cash to investors. According to a fresh analysis of the sector, a dearth of new mega fund raises and “persistent liquidity constraints” across the industry led fundraising [...]
Jamie Dimon warns markets are under-estimating global risks January 13, 2026 The boss of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, has warned global markets not to underestimate current risks, as the US banking giant hiked its provisions for bad loans. The world’s most influential banker said that whilst the US economy had remained “resilient” and consumer and business trends were “generally healthy,” ongoing risks persisted. “Markets seem to under-appreciate [...]