Jim Kane
LightNews LightNews
banner
kanejim.bsky.social
Jim Kane
@kanejim.bsky.social
1K followers 430 following 960 posts
thisisfincap.substack.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
kanejim.bsky.social
I had missed this detail from BlackRock world...
Screenshot of a Bank of America Research note from November 12, 2025. Text says: Privatization of markets: Privates & passives continue to gain share from active equities (barbell theme) while private credit, infrastructure, transition/renewables and secondaries grow faster than private equity. There is a nd derivative layer from general partner consolidations. BLK plans to leverage Preqin to create private market indices, which it could convert into iShares ETFs if CME/ICE can create futures contracts on the indices.
November 13, 2025 at 3:06 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
someone's still getting their money!

www.moodys.com/research/Pub...
Public K-12 School Districts – Pennsylvania Aid intercept program shields bondholders amid state budget impasse Pennsylvania’s fiscal 2026 budget impasse, which began on July 1, 2025, has now stretched into its fifth month, leaving school districts across the state without critical funding. Bondholders of Pennsylvania school district debt remain well-protected, however, despite the absence of state funding because of the strength and reliability of the Pennsylvania School District Intercept Program (Aa3 stable). The program was reformed through the implementation of Act 85 after the prolonged 2016 budget impasse to assure debt service payments are made even when state aid is not flowing to school district operations. This legislative reform is the primary reason why bondholders remain insulated from loss, even as district operations face mounting fiscal strain. During the current state budget impasse, 54 districts have so far requested their aid be diverted to their paying agent or trustee for the benefit of bondholders. The requests cover 109 payments through Nov. 12, totaling $157 million. While bondholders remain unimpaired, districts have nonetheless begun to face operational challenges. Some have turned to issuing revenue anticipation loans, while others have implemented hiring and spending freezes. Districts with limited local revenue are especially vulnerable because of their reliance on state aid for more than 60% of their operating budgets. And while federal funding generally accounts for less than 10% of total revenue, the federal shutdown only compounds the fiscal stress districts are facing. Without resolution, some districts may exhaust their cash reserves by January, placing operational continuity at risk.
November 11, 2025 at 8:09 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
take the politics out of pensions = remove it as far as possible from democratic control.

from Pitchbook's "Capital Pool" newsletter pitchbook.com/tag/capital-...
One solution is to advocate for elected officials to adopt the "Canadian model," where private management firms oversee the investment of public pension fund dollars at arm's length from the pension funds and their administrators. In the US, pension fund boards are typically a mix of elected officials or former elected officials. At pension funds, such as Calpers, the overlap of investment and political duties has raised conflict-of-interest concerns. Some Republican politicians in the state, for example, have accused the pension fund's fiduciaries of making politically motivated investments in sustainable and ESG products. The Canadian pension fund management companies, such as CPP Investments, are overseen by boards of directors that operate separately from the federal and provincial governments. Investment professionals and corporate executives with specific financial expertise sit on these boards and are unbound by the political and civil salary caps that restrict their US neighbors.
November 11, 2025 at 2:13 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
Anyone lost their cat?
Photo of an approximately 12-foot tall green tiger outside of the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia.
November 11, 2025 at 11:50 AM
kanejim.bsky.social
Recently learned that they also do proxy voting. Wonder if it's the same analysts?
Proxy Voting via the Wealth-Focused Policy October 27, 2025 What is the Wealth-Focused Policy? As one of five off-the-shelf policies, the Egan-Jones Wealth-Focused Policy is a unique offering in the market that prioritizes shareholder wealth over market-standard environmental, social, and governance (ESG) compliance. Unlike conventional ESG frameworks that impose uniform governance and sustainability standards, this policy’s guiding philosophy is to allow management the freedom to manage, while holding directors accountable for poor returns to shareholders.
November 10, 2025 at 11:22 AM
kanejim.bsky.social
The worst queue I've seen was in a UBS real estate fund a few years ago.

sarasota.granicus.com/MetaViewer.p...
Screenshot of a Morgan Stanley research note on the UBS Trumbull Property Fund. The highlighted text says: "Further, investor redemptions surged to $8.2 billion (51% of the Fund’s net asset value) after a 2Q 2019 write-down of the Fund’s sizable retail portfolio."
November 9, 2025 at 7:31 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
cool, cool... nothing to see here.

www.moodys.com/research/Lev...
Leveraged Loan Covenants — US PIK poised to break into spec-rated debt Summary As competition between syndicated and private lenders intensifies, PIK features are making inroads into the world of rated debt. We are seeing this in novel ways as the broadly syndicated (BSL) and high yield markets entice borrowers by adopting features once reserved for private credit. This is happening for both “origination PIK” (which defers interest while a growing business matures) and “restructuring PIK” (which relieves liquidity pressure on a struggling issuer). However, these PIK features bring unexpected risks that can go well beyond an issuer's ability to pay interest today.
November 7, 2025 at 1:21 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
early data point to support the cynical view...

@benbraun.bsky.social @cedricdurand.bsky.social

www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ame...
With unrealistic return expectations piled up, the surest way of ensuring a profitable exit for current investors is to bring in new investors. Bringing in $1 trillion of “dumb” 401(k) money, industry thinking goes, will allow pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and large individual wealth owners to exit their holdings with a profit. Smaller savers would be left holding this bag of overvalued assets. In other words, a Ponzi scheme.
November 7, 2025 at 12:35 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
this one has some twists...
The sale effort, first reported by the FT, attracted interest from private capital groups including TPG, Apollo, Carlyle and Sixth Street, but many abandoned takeover efforts during their due diligence or were unwilling to pay a large premium. That left Aquarian, a nascent insurance-focused private capital group founded in 2017 by Rudy Sahay, a former executive at Guggenheim, as Brighthouse’s most interested bidder. But takeover negotiations between Brighthouse and the New York-based investment group stretched for months, with talks stalling at many points. Brighthouse’s advisers pressed Aquarian, which is far smaller in size and manages just $25bn in assets, for details on its equity backing. Aquarian is structured as an insurance holding company that owns five insurance groups outright, and has a separate asset management arm that invests the portfolios of those insurers and others for a fee.
November 6, 2025 at 1:24 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
😂
Screenshot of a tweet: Bill Ackman @BillAckman . @ZohranKMamdani , congrats on the win. Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do. 10:18 PM · Nov 4, 2025 · 5.4M Views
November 5, 2025 at 11:27 AM
kanejim.bsky.social
Was curious if Alex Karp tried to sound less crazy when talking to analyst and… 😂
Alexander Karp Greetings. By any normal or even reasonable standard, these are not normal results. These are not even strong results. These aren't extraordinary results. These are arguably the best results that any software company has ever delivered. And that's not hyperbolic, despite what your analyst friends may want you to believe because they've been wrong at every price, they're wrong in every -- at every single round. But of course, they're perspective and they're not investing our own money. But a normal enterprise company should not have a Rule of 40 above 100%. A normal enterprise company at our base should not have over 100% U.S. commercial growth should not have 77% growth in the U.S. So one of the issues we have with the arbiters of truth is, it was the American worker that we supported and the American worker that we helped make rich. And arbiters of truth somehow did not participate in that because they were such experts. And of course -- but what these numbers show is doing that and taking the American worker along with it and doing it in a way that foreshadowed the future FDE, ontology foundry, making each specific institution, making the American Warfighter fight the way the American Warfighter is born to fight.
November 4, 2025 at 6:45 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
All these stories are the equivalent of Trump's "a lot of people are saying" line.

on.ft.com/3Lm6n0W
FT headline says: Miami realtors pitch safe spaces for millionaires fleeing Mamdani’s New York A predicted flight caused by democratic socialist mayoral candidate’s likely victory on Tuesday has yet to materialise
November 3, 2025 at 5:57 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
So close to the finish line
NY Post headline from July says “ Andrew Cuomo says he 'will move to Florida' if Zohran Mamdani becomes NYC mayor”
November 3, 2025 at 2:09 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
further confirmation from the 10/29 earnings call.
Karl Keirstead Okay. This one is for Amy. Amy, I certainly don't want to take you down too complex an accounting path with this question, but the investment in OpenAI that sits in other income at $4.1 billion is so large that I think the audience could -- listening in could benefit from a little bit more color about what that is. It feels like it's so much larger than you were running through other income in prior quarters that it mustn't just be your share of the OpenAI losses. So could you just describe that? And what we can expect in subsequent quarters? And whether this signals any kind of accounting change? Amy Hood The Q1 number was not impacted at all by the new agreement that was put in place. Let me first say that. Secondly, that increased loss was all due to our percentage of losses in OpenAI due to the equity method. So just to be very clear. So there is not anything there that is not the increased losses from OpenAI.
October 31, 2025 at 11:29 AM
kanejim.bsky.social
lol, wut? i can't tell if this was a joke or not.

www.buyoutsinsider.com/after-curtai...
Allan Emkin, managing principal at Meketa Investment Group, said that compared to prior iterations of the Oregon Investment Council, the board’s focus has collectively shifted to managing risks, investment costs and the system’s funded status. “Just as a point of historical interest, there was once [an Oregon] council member who believed the council’s only responsibility should be to get returns, not to look at the liability side, and so made the somewhat humorous recommendation that 100 percent of the portfolio should be in private equity since that’s the highest rate of return,” he said. “That was, of course, during a period of private equity outperforming by many basis points.” Steiner said during the meeting that the shift in sentiment exemplified in the survey didn’t come as a surprise to her.
October 28, 2025 at 1:24 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
That consultants have driven the ship on pensions piling into 'alternatives' won't be surprising, but I'm not sure that I've seen an empirical study before.

mailchi.mp/verdadcap/th...

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
"Our evidence suggests that the rise of alternatives has been fueled by an increase in their perceived risk-adjusted returns relative to public equities," the authors write. This perception is embedded in consultants’ capital market assumptions, which play an outsize role in how public pensions and other asset owners shape their portfolios. Figure 2 shows how consultants’ capital markets assumptions shifted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
October 27, 2025 at 1:29 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
There is no cat in this image.
Image of a tuxedo cat peeking out of a window with a white curtain in Philadelphia.
October 24, 2025 at 8:05 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
They haven’t bothered with Apple Maps.
Image of 61 Haverford Station road on Apple Maps
October 24, 2025 at 1:07 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
Someone needs to tell the consultants meketa.com/leadership/2...
Capital market assumptions show the 20 year expected return for private debt outpaces all public equities and everything except the expected return for private equity
October 23, 2025 at 12:46 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
Related - here’s a snapshot of Meta and the lender (Blue Owl) for its Louisiana data center trying to position themselves limit the damage if things implode.

pitchbook.com/news/article...
Blue Owl has put up an initial $7 billion in cash for the new entity, with Meta set to receive a $3 billion distribution upon closing. Blue Owl’s contribution is part-funded by fixed-income investors, including Pimco, through a private bond offering. In a private lending market characterized by relatively low-risk investments in cash-generative businesses, Blue Owl has stood out for its embrace of large-scale, high-tech infrastructure investments. For Blue Owl, the transaction includes a residual value guarantee, which means that if Meta chooses not to renew its lease, the facility will be marketed for sale. And if the resale value of the data center falls below a pre-agreed threshold, Meta is liable to make up the shortfall to investors. “Meta wants the optionality to be able to walk away from this facility if either their strategy changes or they decide they are going to take a different approach to AI training, or God forbid this ‘bubble cracks’ and the world goes a different direction,” said Naveen Sarma, a managing director at S&P, who covers credit ratings for companies in the telecommunication and media sector.
October 23, 2025 at 11:54 AM
kanejim.bsky.social
The next version of ChatGPT will be upgraded to the asset manager capitalism model.
During the press briefing, Tangen was asked to comment on ChatGPT’s advice that a long-term investor keen to manage climate risk should reduce its exposure to fossil fuel companies. “We disagree, we won’t do it,” he said. Tangen then asked the head of his climate team, Eivind Filflet, to run the same question by Claude, the language model developed by Anthropic PBC. Claude’s response laid out the case “for continuing engagement,” he said. “But Claude knows me,” Filflet said. Tangen said the example demonstrates why it’s still important to have a “human in the mix.”
October 22, 2025 at 4:18 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
And the 2025 iteration is out now with the pro-austerity bias fully intact.

rpc.cfainstitute.org/sites/defaul...
October 22, 2025 at 12:17 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
Moody's survey and commerce department data on the drop-off in international students to the U.S.

www.moodys.com/research/Hig...
...a drop in enrollment of international students of around 6%. Graduate programs, which enroll 60% of international students and typically charge higher tuition, are experiencing the most significant declines, around 10%... ...International Trade Administration showing that 19% fewer international students entered the US in August 2025 – the peak entry month – compared with a year earlier. That included a 45% drop in students from India – the largest source of overseas students in the US – who primarily enroll in master's degree programs.
October 22, 2025 at 11:25 AM
kanejim.bsky.social
The most overdetermined outcome...

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
BlackRock Is Pulling Bitcoin Whales Into Wall Street’s Orbit By Emily Graffeo October 21, 2025 at 8:03 AM EDT Big Bitcoin holders are moving their wealth from the blockchain onto Wall Street’s balance sheet. A new generation of ETFs is giving the crypto rich a novel way to fold their digital fortunes into the regulated financial system — without selling, and through funds run by big asset managers like BlackRock Inc. A regulatory change this summer opened the door for large investors to hand their Bitcoin to an ETF in exchange for shares of the fund. It’s called an in-kind transaction and is used across most ETFs, but was only approved for Bitcoin products this July. The process is generally tax-neutral, whereby no cash changes hands and no sale is recorded. The result is that a volatile digital asset becomes a line item on a brokerage statement — easier to borrow against, pledge as collateral, or pass onto heirs.
October 21, 2025 at 4:28 PM
kanejim.bsky.social
www.pionline.com/institutiona...
AFSCME Local 3299 — which represents more than 40,000 of the University of California’s service and patient care technical workers — contends that the university could make better use of its capital for plan participants, students and alumni. “It’s just a question of priorities,” a spokesperson said in an Oct. 17 statement. The university “would be better served to invest its abundant resources in the development of affordable housing units near UC worksites — a stable investment that would generate consistent returns both to the university and the workers who make it run.”
October 21, 2025 at 3:35 PM