The Wall Street Skinny

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• Ex-Morgan Stanley Bankers: "Strangers" by Belle Burden our HOT TAKE on the Real Finances 27.05.2026 51min

  Send us Fan Mail Two weeks ago, one of the most powerful women on Wall Street asked us to weigh in on Belle Burden's bombshell memoir: "Strangers". As two women who've lived and worked in every world this book touches — from raising three kids in New York City to working on Wall Street to growing up in Massachusetts and spending summers on Martha's Vineyard — we're uniquely positioned to read between the lines of a story that's been everywhere from Oprah to every video in your feed. In this e...
• Hedge Funds Want the Equity in Your Home, feat. Tacora Capital Founder Keri Findley 26.05.2026 40min

  Send us Fan Mail In this episode we dig into the state of the American consumer's balance sheet, which on paper isn't broke but is increasingly "boxed in." We walk through eye-opening Federal Reserve data: total household debt hit an all-time high of $18.8 trillion in Q1 2026 (up $4.6 trillion since pre-COVID), credit card balances peaked at $1.25 trillion with rates north of 20%, and while headline wages are up roughly 32% since 2020, real inflation-adjusted earnings have grown just 2-3% aga...
• $53 Billion Hedge Fund Chief Strategist: The Next Market Shock Is Hiding in Plain Sight 14.05.2026 55min

  Send us Fan Mail We sat down with Elizabeth Burton, the new Chief Strategist at Fortress, one of the world’s biggest and most respected hedge funds, to ask what actually matters most in this market — and her answer might surprise you. This is the same Elizabeth Burton who, back in 2020, made the call that inflation would be sticky, not transitory — while much of the market, and even the Fed, was still arguing the opposite. Now she’s back with another uncomfortable view: the market may be foc...
• Burry Left in a Hurry! The Loophole GameStop Could Use to Pull Off Buying eBay (10x its Size) 08.05.2026 24min

  Send us Fan Mail Michael Burry just dumped all his GameStop shares. eBay reportedly deactivated Ryan Cohen's account. And the $56 billion "takeover" GameStop pitched on CNBC? It would actually have eBay shareholders paying for most of it themselves. We're back to break down the latest twists in the GameStop–eBay drama — and why this deal is structured unlike almost any takeover Wall Street has seen. In this episode, Kristen walks Jen (and you) through the rollover equity mechanics that make t...
• GameStop Just Bid $56 Billion for eBay. What is ACTUALLY Going On???? 05.05.2026 17min

  Send us Fan Mail 🚨 EMERGENCY EPISODE: GameStop just made an unsolicited $56 billion bid for eBay, and the math is NOT mathing. After watching CEO Ryan Cohen's bizarre live CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin (where he kept deflecting questions with answers like "it's on the website"), we hit *record* immediately to break this down. Kristen, our resident investment banking, PE, and M&A expert, walks through why this deal defies the laws of physics: The offer: $125/share, half cash, ha...
• Every New Fed Chair Has Crashed the Market. A New One is Coming May 15th 30.04.2026 48min

  Send us Fan Mail Jerome Powell's term as Fed Chair ends May 15th, and his likely successor Kevin Warsh is poised to walk into the most fractured Fed since 1992. In this episode, we're breaking down what actually happened at Powell's final meeting, who the dissenters were and why, and what it tells us about the Fed Warsh is about to inherit. But the bigger question we're wrestling with is this: what does Kevin Warsh actually want to do? He's been remarkably vocal for 20 years about his views o...
• Financial Times Reporter TELLS ALL: Sujeet Indap on Why Private Credit is Worse than Credit in 2008 | Caesars Part 3/3 25.04.2026 46min

  Send us Fan Mail In Part 3 of our Caesars Palace Coup series, we're back with Sujeet Indap of the Financial Times — co-author of the definitive book on the $30 billion LBO disaster — to connect the dots between 2008's creditor-on-creditor violence and the private credit tremors rattling markets right now. Caesars itself is back on the auction block, with Tilman Fertitta's Golden Nugget circling alongside a potential management buyout involving Tom Reeg and Carl Icahn. We dig into what a 2.0 d...
• Restructuring 101: How Private Equity Pits Debt Investors Against Each Other | Caesars Part 2/3 20.04.2026 45min

  Send us Fan Mail This is Part II of our Caesars Palace deep dive, and honestly, this is where things get truly unhinged. If Part I was the setup — the $30 billion LBO, the financial crisis, and the private equity firms scrambling to keep the lights on — this episode is the masterclass in what happens when the knives come out. We're breaking down the mechanics of distressed debt investing, restructuring, and bankruptcy. Above all, we'll explain how Apollo essentially invented a new playbook fo...
• Private Equity Knows Something Private Credit Doesn't | Caesars $30B LBO is the Playbook | Caesars Part 1/3 16.04.2026 49min

  Send us Fan Mail Private credit is the crisis everyone's watching, but the real story -- and the one no one has been focused on -- is what private equity is doing behind the scenes. In Part 1 of our 3-part series, Kristen and Jen break down the $30 billion leveraged buyout of Caesars by Apollo and TPG, the deal that became the blueprint for what we now call "creditor-on-creditor violence" and flipped everything everyone thought they knew about the relationship between debt and equity investo...
• Morgan Stanley's Head & CIO of Private Equity Solutions: The Ultimate Deep Dive into PE Investing 11.04.2026 1u 6min

  Send us Fan Mail Buckle up, because this week we're sitting down with Neha Champaneria Markle, who runs the Private Equity Solutions group at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Neha walks us through the entire private equity landscape and answers the questions you've been dying to ask an insider including: - Is "AI is going to destroy software and therefore private equity"? - Why are fundraising cycles getting longer? - What does vintage year really tell you about a fund's pe...
• Wall Street is Watching Something More Concerning than Oil 01.04.2026 42min

  Send us Fan Mail Everyone's been freaking out about oil and stocks, but the scariest thing this past week actually happened in bonds, and almost nobody was talking about it. Last week the US Treasury held three auctions that were utter disasters, with dealer takedown more than double its 12-month average — worse than the tariff panic of April 2025. We get into what that means and why it matters. Then we get into the viral Fortune Magazine article claiming the US Treasury declared the feder...
• Private Credit: Even Apollo's Trapped Investors. Here's Exactly What You Need to Know 28.03.2026 53min

  Send us Fan Mail Private credit is all over the headlines — and all over your social media feed. Apollo just gated redemptions, Moody's stripped KKR's credit fund of its investment grade status, and Bill Maher is talking about it on late night TV. But what's actually going on beneath the panic? In this episode, we break down the alphabet soup of fund structures — publicly traded BDCs, private BDCs, interval funds — and explain why the vehicle you're invested in might matter just as much as wh...
• Private Credit UPDATE: Is this 2008 all over again? 12.03.2026 50min

  Send us Fan Mail If you read the headlines about Private Credit, it feels like we're on the verge of another Global Financial Crisis. So, are we? In this Private Credit "state of the union" episode, we break down the structural differences between today's private credit market and the pre-GFC banking system, why the "private" in private credit makes it so hard to know how deep the problems actually go, and whether the knock-on effects to pensions, banks, and public markets could make t...
• Head of Investor Relations at $3 Billion Hedge Fund Tells All | Capital Raising 101 11.03.2026 30min

  Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we sit down with Kate Baumann, Head of Investor Relations at Empyrean Capital Partners (a $3 billion event-driven, multi-strategy hedge fund), LIVE from iConnections in Miami. Here's the thing nobody tells you: the amount of money a hedge fund manages — its AUM — is the single biggest driver of how much everyone at that fund gets paid. The 2% management fee is what funds the operation, allows traders to generate good returns (alpha) which then can pay t...
• Jobs, Oil, and the Ellison's LBO of Warner Brothers | TWSS x CNBC's Dan Nathan & Guy Adami: "He Said / She Said" 09.03.2026 20min

  Send us Fan Mail We're back for the ninth installment of He Said She Said, our regular crossover series with Dan Nathan and Guy Adami of CNBC's Fast Money. We recorded just after the open Friday morning, breaking down a February jobs report that caught many off guard -- 92,000 jobs lost, massive downward revisions to prior months, and mounting evidence of an organic economic slowdown that's been building for over a year, well before AI has meaningfully reshaped the labor force. We dive ...
• Iran Is Shaking the Oil Markets. What the Top Commodities Traders Are Thinking Right Now 05.03.2026 50min

  Send us Fan Mail In this special emergency episode of The Wall Street Skinny, we sat down with Andreas Laskaratos, CEO of AB Commodities Group, a global oil and gas shipping and trading firm with operations spanning Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Andreas is one of the few people in the world who operates across both the physical and financial sides of the commodities complex, and he's been a longtime friend of the show. With Iran blockading the Strait of Hormuz, shipping rates spiking 5x ov...
• LIVE from Miami: Is Private Credit Fundraising OVER? 03.03.2026 18min

  Send us Fan Mail We sat down with Ron Biscardi, the CEO and co-founder of iConnections, live at Global Alts Miami to get the skinny on what's happening with fund managers and allocators in real time. Last year, private credit was the undisputed darling of investment strategies. Now, on the heels of Blue Owl headlines and concerns about cracks within the private credit markets, headlines seem to suggest a tough road ahead. But reality is far more nuanced. Ron synthesized both emot...
• Paramount Outbids Netflix for WBD & Middle East Military Action Fallout | Emergency Episode 02.03.2026 25min

  Send us Fan Mail Kristen and Jen tackle two major stories in this double emergency episode. First, Kristen breaks down latest update in the Warner Bros saga — how Paramount outbid Netflix with a $31/share offer, why Netflix walked away, and what the deal means financially. They cover the cursed history of Warner Bros. M&A deals, the staggering leverage Paramount is taking on (potentially the largest LBO ever), the accretion/dilution math that made this a non-starter for Netflix, and why i...
• Industry S4E8 "Both/And" | Where does Industry go from here? 01.03.2026 1u 58min

  Send us Fan Mail It's a bittersweet day at The Wall Street Skinny, where we are recapping the SEASON FINALE!! While this one is lighter on finance than most episodes this season, we still dig into the mechanics of closing out a massive short position without spooking the tape. We also break down how hedge fund fees actually work — the industry-standard "two and twenty" structure where managers earn a 2% management fee on assets under management plus 20% of profits — and use that framework to ...
• TWSS x CNBC's Dan Nathan & Guy Adami: "He Said / She Said" - Blue Owl's Private Credit Fiasco 25.02.2026 23min

  Send us Fan Mail We teamed up with Guy Adami and Dan Nathan to discuss two major developing market stories ahead of meeting in Miami for the iConnections Global Alts conference. The first topic is stress in private credit, centered on Blue Owl’s retail-focused semi-liquid vehicle (Blue Owl Capital Corp II) facing heavy redemptions and gating, highlighting the liquidity mismatch between retail redemption needs and long-dated loan assets. They contrast the gated evergreen structure with Blue Ow...