Ken Frankel

Oaktree private credit redemptions $BAM: OAKTREE WILL MEET 8.5% PRIVATE CREDIT FUND REDEMPTIONS IN FULL Oaktree Capital Management is meeting all redemption requests for a private credit fund, allowing investors to take out 8.5% of net assets. The firm's parent company, Brookfield Corp., is contributing roughly $80 million to help satisfy the request, with the Oaktree fund repurchasing 6.8% of its own shares. Oaktree is cutting the fund's dividend by 2 cents to position the strategy "for long-term sustainability", with the fund still expected to deliver an 8.5% annualized net distribution rate.

“UBS said the fund's liquid assets were ​insufficient to meet redemption requests. The move by UBS is the latest ​in a string of asset managers placing caps ​on ⁠funds, most of them private credit funds in the United States, amid a surge in redemption requests.” 👇🏼 reuters.com/business/finan…

David Zaslav Cashed Out — and Revealed the New Hollywood Dream indiewire.com/features/comme… via @IndieWire

Hell of a graphic from Morgan Stanley

New Money Saves the Day for Now. But $3 Billion Inflows Mask Deeper Liquidity Risks at CCLFX “The pitch was simple: access to private credit, 9.5% annualized returns, 1% management fee, no performance fee (and no minimum investor qualifications). Capital was pouring in. The machine was eating. Last week, the machine got indigestion….. ….Between March and September 2025, total borrowings jumped from $6.7B to $9.8B (a 45% increase in six months). During the same period, total assets grew 18.5%. In other words, the fund was borrowing faster than it was growing….” @LeylaKuni __________ March 4,2026 “..Rubric, founded by a former deputy of the New York Mets owner Steven A. Cohen, predicts that Cliffwater will be “the first domino in the bank run we foresee..” x.com/kshaughnessy2/… __________ March 9, 2026 Rubric Capital Sounds Alarm Systemic Risk Brewing in Leveraged Private Credit x.com/kshaughnessy2/… ____________ accreditedinsight.com/p/cliffwater-c…

Breaking: JPMorgan is building new Credit Default Swaps, or CDO's to let clients bet against Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft & Oracle History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes

OpenAI to Shut Down the Sora Video App hollywoodreporter.com/business/digit…

Everyday there seems to be one more ft.com/content/9a1b60…

A federal judge is allowing the release of deposition videos of two former DOGE staffers, ruling that the risk of "embarrassment and reputational harm" is not enough to overcome the public interest in the videos. abcnews.link/P1xYZ26

I don’t think people realize how much healthcare costs are driving big companies to fire and not hire. It costs them $30k per family, per year for premiums and care. Most of that goes to the massive, vertically integrated insurance companies that send weekly bills that no one reviews in details. And it doesn’t include the company overhead to deal with it all. It’s usually the 2nd largest expense after payroll. Which is insane It’s far easier to blame AI than it is to blame Healthcare costs. Want to increase jobs, wages and improve affordability for every American ? Break up the biggest insurance companies. Make divest non insurance companies. They don’t need thousands of subsidiaries. That’s how they game and abuse the system and increase costs for all of us. Call your senator and tell them to support the BreakUp Big Medicine Bill by @HawleyMO and @SenWarren.

A Stanford student got reported for academic misconduct last semester. His research paper was so good his professor assumed he bought it. The academic integrity hearing lasted 3 hours. Here's what happened in that room. The panel asked him to explain his methodology from scratch. He opened his laptop, pulled up Kimi.com, and started rebuilding the entire paper live in front of them. First he fed it his raw notes and asked: "You are a research methodology expert. Here are my raw notes. Identify the 3 strongest arguments buried in this data, rank them by originality, and show me exactly where each one challenges or extends existing literature." The professors went quiet. Then he ran: "Now simulate a hostile peer reviewer with a PhD in this field. Generate every serious objection they would raise against my thesis. Then tell me which objections actually have merit and which ones I can dismantle." One professor leaned forward and asked him to stop so she could write down the prompt. He kept going. "Take my weakest argument and steelman it harder than I did. Show me what it would look like if it were airtight. Then tell me what I'd need to prove to get it there." Then the one that ended the hearing. "You are my thesis advisor. I have 24 hours before submission. Read this draft and tell me the single change that would move this from a B+ to an A. Be brutal." He walked them through how he'd used that last output to rewrite his conclusion three times until it held up under every objection in the room. What took most PhD candidates 6 months of back-and-forth with advisors, he was doing in real-time inside a single workflow. The panel didn't just clear him. They gave him the highest grade in the department's history and asked him to present the workflow to faculty. The irony is beautiful. The paper looked too good to be human because he'd found a way to think harder than most humans bother to. That's not cheating. That's the new ceiling.

Disney, Sony, Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros. control whether you can take screenshots on Netflix. The five studios created a joint lab in 2006 to draft the security rules that every streaming platform must follow. Netflix pays $20 billion a year for content licenses, and those contracts come with mandatory encryption requirements. The studios decide, and Netflix obeys. One of those requirements: all videos have to be encrypted, so you can't copy them. A piece of software called Widevine, owned by Google, is baked into your phone, your browser, and your smart TV. It routes the video through a protected part of your device so that when you hit the screenshot button, all you get is a black rectangle. The video literally never passes through the part of the device that handles screenshots. And the whole thing barely works anyway. Anyone with a laptop can turn off a single Chrome setting, and screenshots work again. Organized piracy rings don't bother with screenshots at all. They rip entire movies. Piracy sites got 216 billion visits in 2024, up 66% from four years earlier. The encryption stops your aunt from sharing a funny scene on Twitter. It does almost nothing to stop actual pirates. Paradoxically, Netflix's most successful show of all time went viral almost entirely through screenshots and memes. Squid Game cost $21 million to make. Netflix says it generated roughly $891 million in value for the company, measured by how many people it brought to the platform and kept watching. The TikTok hashtag alone hit 44 billion views. Netflix added 4.4 million new subscribers in the quarter it dropped, double the previous quarter's total. Nobody ran a marketing campaign for it. Fans did all the work for free, because they could share what they saw. Netflix made $42.5 billion in revenue last year with 325 million subscribers. A $21 million Korean show returned 42 times its production cost because people posted screenshots and memes. The contracts that block your screenshots were written when piracy meant burning DVDs, not tweeting a frame from Wednesday.

Private equity and private credit are looking to sell a lot of assets to retail investors. Those retail investors should check to make sure they know where their wallets are before they invest. bobpisani.substack.com/p/private-equi…

Please see below for the latest Bloomberg coverage on private credit. Over the last few weeks, some funds in advanced markets have experienced (depending on the fund) fraud allegations, a surge in investor withdrawals, and the implementation of redemption "gates." This is being compounded by reduced access to bank facilities, underwriting concerns, and credit quality downgrades. This environment is fueling general unease, making it increasingly difficult for even the most disciplined funds in advanced markets to differentiate themselves. #economy #markets #privatecredit

Apollo gives investors only 45% of requested withdrawals from $15 billion private credit fund cnbc.com/2026/03/23/apo…

Flagship Blackstone credit fund posts first monthly loss since 2022 ft.trib.al/xpZhm0i

🚨BREAKING: SUPER MICRO CO-FOUNDER ARRESTED FOR SMUGGLING $2.5B IN NVIDIA GPUs TO CHINA >SMCI co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw arrested today >personally holds $464 MILLION in SMCI stock >charged with smuggling BILLIONS in Nvidia servers to china >used a southeast asian shell company to funnel $2.5B in servers to chinese buyers >$510 million worth shipped in just THREE WEEKS in spring 2025 >built thousands of fake dummy servers to fool U.S compliance auditors >caught on surveillance camera using a HAIR DRYER to swap serial number stickers >coordinated the whole thing over encrypted group chats >SMCI down 12% after hours >faces up to 30 years in federal prison ITS SO OVER…

🚨BREAKING: Qatar just declared force majeure on LNG contracts to Italy, Belgium, South Korea, and China. For up to 5 years. Here's what the CEO just told In an exclusive interview with Reuters, Qatar's Energy Minister and CEO of QatarEnergy just confirmed the damage from Iran's attack on Ras Laffan. It's worse than anyone thought. → 2 out of 14 LNG trains damaged → 1 of 2 gas-to-liquids (GTL) facilities damaged → 12.8 million tonnes per year of LNG offline for 3-5 years → 17% of Qatar's total LNG export capacity gone → $20 billion annual revenue loss → $26 billion in damaged facilities (the CEO said they "should not be attacked") QatarEnergy may declare force majeure on long term LNG supply contracts to: → Italy → Belgium → South Korea → China For up to 5 years. Additional exports declining: → Condensates: Down 24% → LPG: Down 13% → Naphtha: Down 6% → Sulphur: Down 6% → Helium: Down 14% The damaged trains: → Train S4 and S6: 30% owned by ExxonMobil, rest by QatarEnergy Production cannot restart until hostilities cease. What this means? 12.8 million tonnes per year = 17% of Qatar's LNG capacity. 17% of its capacity just disappeared for 3-5 years. Italy, Belgium, South Korea, China: These countries had long-term contracts with Qatar. Force majeure means those contracts are suspended. They now have to compete in spot markets for replacement cargoes. Against each other. And against every other buyer scrambling for LNG. $20 billion per year in lost revenue for Qatar. $26 billion in facilities damaged. The only country with capacity to absorb Qatari volumes at scale is the United States. I wrote a full breakdown on how this shift benefits US LNG producers and which stocks are positioned to win from Qatar's structural supply loss👇 open.substack.com/pub/themerchan… #Iran #Qatar #LNG