Bloomberg Businessweek

The people, companies and trends shaping the global economy.
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Stephen Nesbitt was on no one’s list of Wall Street heavyweights when he bumped into a thirty-something salesman pitching the next big thing for wealthy investors: private credit.
Nesbitt — who, as it happened, had written a book on private debt — took the idea and ran with it.Within a few years, he and his son Blake transformed their modest consulting business, Cliffwater LLC, into an unlikely giant. Their strategy: rather than sweat the details of every direct loan themselves, they’d piggyback on the firms that did. They’d also invest in industry heavyweights, creating something akin to a fund-of-private-credit-funds.

Now the father-and-son team, who rode private credit on the way up, risk falling hard on the way down. As investors in private credit funds rush for the exits, Cliffwater has become one of the biggest question marks in the $1.8 trillion industry.

The worry isn’t so much that private loans will go bad all at once and crush the funds where Cliffwater has invested. It’s that antsy investors will keep asking for money back, prompting Cliffwater to dash for cash itself — instigating a vicious circle of redemptions and markdowns.
Concerns center around the $33 billion Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund, the largest of its kind in private credit. It’s what’s known as an interval fund, a type of closed-end vehicle that isn’t traded on an exchange but rather promises to buy back shares from investors at set intervals, usually quarterly, at net asset value. Cliffwater is legally obliged to buy back at least 5% every quarter if investors ask.That promise was a key selling point in good times. “Liquidity is the first-, second- and third-most important thing,” Blake Nesbitt emphasized at an industry roundtable this month.

Today's show features:
Bloomberg Leveraged Finance reporters Ellen DiMauro and Olivia Fishlow on their Big Take story about Private Credit
Ray Takeyh, Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at Council on Foreign Relations
Former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross
Drive to the Close with Emily Green Ellevest Head of Wealth Management
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Nicolai Tangen, boss of Norway's sovereign wealth fund, visited the Middle East and was struck by the area's dynamism, but hours after his departure, the region erupted in a war. The fund is planning for potentially bleak scenarios, including the return of inflation and geopolitical fragmentation, which could have direct consequences for the fund and implications for the stock market. For more, Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec spoke with Bloomberg Opinion Columisnt Lionel Laurent
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The people, companies and trends shaping the global economy.

Watch Carol and Tim LIVE every day on YouTube: http://bit.ly/3vTiACF.

During an all-hands meeting at Apple in January, an employee asked about a spate of executive moves. The company’s chief operating officer recently retired, the chief financial officer and general counsel took smaller roles as a way to prepare for their own retirements, and in a single week in December its heads of artificial intelligence, user interfaces and environmental initiatives all announced their departures.While part of the exodus was related to Apple Inc.’s well-documented struggles in AI, it also reflected a logical transition at a company that turns 50 on April 1.

Apple stock has made everyone at the top of its org chart fabulously wealthy, and many are entering the stage of life that often inspires people to prioritize finally spending some time with their families instead of the next generation of iPhones. In his response to the employee’s question, Tim Cook, the company’s 65-year-old chief executive officer, struck an atypically reflective tone. “When people get to a certain age, some,” he said, “are going to retire,” letting the word “some” hang out there in a way that suggested he wasn’t talking about himself, drawing laughter from the audience. “The thing we have to do is make sure that Apple moves on” and reaches the “next level and the next level and the next level.” Cook added that he spends “a lot of time” thinking about “who’s in the room” in 5, 10 and 15 years. “I am obsessed with this.”

Cook, who’s run Apple since taking over from co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011, probably doesn’t expect to be in the room himself for another 15 years. While he’s given no indication of an imminent transition, he’s made it clear he wants his heir to come from within the company so he can serve as a mentor. The central candidate is John Ternus, senior vice president for hardware engineering, who oversees development of the devices that generate roughly 80% of Apple’s revenue. At 50, Ternus is also younger than many of the company’s other senior leaders, meaning he could be in the top job longer.

Ternus has spent about half his life at Apple. He cut his teeth developing computer monitors, oversaw product design for the original iPad and eventually took over development of the Mac. Since getting the top hardware engineering role in 2021, he’s overseen an expansion in Apple’s product lineup, improving quality and focusing on functional improvements around battery life, performance and connectivity. Earlier this month, when Apple held an event in New York to announce the MacBook Neo, a $599 laptop, it was Ternus, not Cook, who did the big reveal. The next day, Ternus also appeared on Good Morning America to talk up the device, the type of media appearance Cook has generally done himself.

Today's show features:
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg News Managing Editor for Consumer Tech
Onur Ant, Bloomberg News, Middle East & North Africa Managing Editor
Jayati Bharadwaj, Head of FX Strategies at TD Securities
Siddharth Phillip, Bloomberg News Chief Correspondent for Global Aviation on recent issues surrounding US airlines
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Stocks and bonds rebounded after President Donald Trump said the US and Iran had “very good” conversations about an end to the conflict in the Middle East.
President rump said strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure and power plants would be postponed for five days following the start of talks with Iran to end the war.
For details on this development, Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney speak with Bloomberg Middle East Reporter Joumanna Bercetche, Silvercrest Asset Management Head of Investment Policy & Strategy Robert Teeter, and Veda Partners Co-Founder Henrietta Treyz.
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The US charged Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, a co-founder of Super Micro Computer Inc., with illegally diverting Nvidia Corp.-powered servers to China in violation of US export controls. Liaw and two others allegedly sold the hardware to a Southeast Asian company and coordinated for its ultimate shipment to Chinese customers, and they made efforts to evade scrutiny by auditors from both Super Micro and the US government. Super Micro said it is cooperating with US authorities and has put Liaw and another defendant on administrative leave, and the company stated that the alleged conduct “is a contravention of the company’s policies and compliance controls”.
For more Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec speaks with Bloomberg Legal reporter Bob Van Voris.
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