Key Topics

For years, Ivy League endowments were the biggest embracers and cheerleaders of private equity investments. Schools such as Brown have gone off the rails and invested as much as 70 percent in private assets (private equity, hedge funds, real estate, private credit) of their $8 billion endowment into these alternative investments. Learn, why elite schools such as Yale, Harvard, Brown, Princeton and others are abandoning ship and selling private equity investment stakes. Learn why Ivy League schools increasingly consider private equity investments as millstones around their necks.

Like changing water into wine, private equity billionaires, Silicon Valley tech gods and Wall Street titans avoid billions in income taxes by receiving much of their income in “carried interest.” With carried interest, financiers receive compensation as lightly taxed long term capital gains. In February 2025, Larry Fink, not wanting to left out on the carried interest gravy train, was given a new compensation structure by his board of directors tied to BlackRock’s private market funds.

CITs, which hold retirement assets, are exempt from SEC oversight in retirement plans, and are the ideal vehicle to stuff complex illiquid alternative investments into. In 2024, target-date funds, the primary investment for 401(k)s, funded with collective investments trusts were more than 50.5 percent of assets, or more than $1.9 trillion of 401(k) balances. Learn how BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, State Street, T. Rowe Price, JPMorgan and others are using CITs to stuff complex alternative assets into 401(k) plans with little protection for retail savers. Learn about the ongoing controversy behind the Intel 401(k), the semiconductor company which has received more than $19 billion in government investment. Intel, using CITs as a back door entrance, began stuffing illiquid private equity investments beginning in 2008.

Some of the world’s largest alternative investment firms, BlackRock, Blackstone, Apollo Global, KKR, Ares Management, Blue Owl, Cliffwater, and others have expanded their assets under management by selling retail investors private credit. The sales pitch of private credit that promised high returns with little risk is turning into a bad dream. Learn why retail investors sought more than $20 billion from private credit fund redemptions but only got out half of that in 2025.

A common play out of the private equity playbook is the use of sale-leasebacks where real estate and other assets are sold to a third party to raise cash, pay debt funded dividends, and are leased back to the business at higher rents and carrying costs. Sale-leasebacks helped to accelerate bankruptcies of At Home, Art Van Furniture, Bed Bath & Beyond, Big Lots, Debenhams, First Brands, Friendly’s Ice Cream, Genesis Healthcare, Healthscope-Australia, Hertz, HCR Manorcare, Hudson’s Bay-Canada, J. Crew, Neiman Marcus, Prospect Medical, Red Lobster, Saks Global, Sears, Southeastern Grocers, Steward Healthcare, Toys “R” Us and others.

Continuation funds are essentially selling old private equity and private credit stakes into a new fund so that asset managers like BlackRock and others can collect new management and performance fees on businesses that did not perform. One of Wall Street’s latest forms of black magic and stuffed with conflicts of interest, in continuation funds, private equity firms are on both sides of the deal as buyers and seller. This is a game of musical chairs where retail investors will be holding the bag. According to Jefferies, in 2025 there was more than $100 billion of continuation vehicles globally sold, up from $70 billion in 2024, up from only $7 billion in 2015. In 2024, BlackRock, in partnership with Jefferies, set up a $1.3 billion private credit continuation fund by pooling 300 first-lien loan positions. Continuation funds sometimes turn into train wrecks like Wheel Pros/Hoonigan which filed bankruptcy in 2024 and United Site Services which filed bankruptcy in 2025.