Oil falls as US pauses Iran strikes, again

Fundraising for Asian private credit has hit its lowest level in twelve years, and that's not investors rotating elsewhere, it's investors pricing in defaults. LPs who piled into direct lending funds across China, India and Southeast Asia during the zero-rate years are now watching portfolio companies struggle to refinance at 10-12% coupons, and fresh capital commitments have dried up in response. The mechanism is straightforward: private credit funds need continuous fundraising to keep lending to existing borrowers, and when that pipeline freezes, distressed borrowers get starved of the very refinancing that was supposed to save them. Managers who raised mega-funds in 2021 now face a wall of maturities with a much thinner investor base willing to backstop them.

Big companies are quietly adding headcount even as the narrative insists AI should be gutting white-collar payrolls. This matters because the entire investment case for enterprise AI spend has leaned on labour substitution, cost lines shrinking as copilots and agents replace analysts and coders. If large employers are hiring anyway, either the productivity gains aren't showing up in headcount decisions yet, or firms are hiring for AI-adjacent roles that offset the cuts elsewhere. Either reading undercuts the cleanest version of the AI-replaces-jobs story that's been used to justify some very rich enterprise software multiples.

HSBC exiting more of its Australian consumer lending book, reportedly to a Blackstone credit unit, extends a pattern the bank started years ago: retreating from retail banking in markets where it can't compete on scale against local incumbents like CBA and Westpac. For Blackstone, this is balance-sheet arbitrage, picking up seasoned loan assets that a regulated bank no longer wants to hold against Basel capital requirements. The real winner is Blackstone's private credit arm, which gets yield-bearing assets without the deposit-funding constraints a bank faces. HSBC gets to redeploy capital toward Asia wealth management, where it's been telling investors the returns are better.

EQT lifting its takeover offer for Perpetual to $1.8 billion tells you the private equity firm's original number was designed to test the board's resolve rather than close a deal. Perpetual, the Australian wealth and asset manager that's been under pressure to break up or sell its underperforming units, now has a materially sweeter number to weigh against staying independent. The gap between first and second offers usually signals how much information asymmetry existed, either EQT lowballed hoping for a quick yes, or Perpetual's board extracted real value through resistance. Shareholders should read the size of the jump as the real indicator of how much was left on the table initially.