The author is a former investment banker and author of “Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of American Idols”
Due to the growing tariff policies of the United States, the volatile financial markets we now face often create unique opportunities. Recalling what happened in October 2022, Credit Suisse launched a major business restructuring, and credit rating agencies announced that they were downgrading Swiss banks’ debts, adding to the turmoil that swallowed up the then 166-year-old financial institutions.
One of the direct steps banks take to respond to weakened confidence is to accelerate the sale of most of their crown jewels, the so-called securitized product group, a large-scale loan business based on assets, or created in financial terms or “original”, in financial terms – products such as mortgages and auto loans and sell them to investors.
The business is a favorite of Credit Suisse and one of its most profitable. But sometimes the market forces you to do things you don’t want to do, and sales for this business are one of them.
As always, the always opportunistic Apollo Global Management, which replaces asset managers, is very happy to aid its growing financial hardships in credit. That's Apollo's DNA. In short, jApollo reached an agreement with Credit Suisse to buy New York's business before other highly regulated financial institutions could take action.
Apollo bought all the discounts, a slight discount to the standard value of the loan portfolio, according to an insider. It renamed the Business Atlas SP and set it to a separate unit, Apollo for the majority owner and mass mutual aid, large insurers and sovereign wealth fund Abu Dhabi Investment Authority as a minority investor.
Since the deal was closed in February 2023, Atlas SP has become Apollo's ambitious plan to remake Wall Street's ambitious plan through the private credit market. "When you really look back at the company's really very strategic deals, it has to be there," Apollo CEO Jim Zelter told me in December. He said he joked with Apollo CEO Marc Rowan that five years ago, they didn't even know how to spell the map atlas.
Now this is crucial for the company's core strategy to increase the private credit generated by Apollo to generate the required revenue assets to cover the liabilities generated by Apollo's wholly owned annuity business Athene. It captures the difference between profits between the two.
Of the $785 billion assets managed by Apollo, about $64.1 billion is private credit and the balance is private equity. Apollo has long preached that its business has less risk, because the duration of its assets and liabilities is long and closely matched, so some banks have lost deposit operations and losses in investor confidence. The news began to come out. The company's market value is $86 billion, up more than 250% over the past five years, although its stock has been greatly affected by the recent wider market turmoil. After the recent rally, it still fell by about 13% in 2025 so far.
Apollo generates approximately $220 billion in assets starting 2024 and has the ambition to increase it to less than $27.5 billion in five years. Atlas SP is the key to achieving this desire. It originated from assets last year with over $40 billion, with a goal this year reaching $50 billion. Atlas SP is one of 16 "platforms" of loan strength that Apollo owns or owns majority equity investments but has special strategic significance. Atlas SP has 300 clients, each borrower is the founder of the small loan itself, providing a large number of American corporate tentacles.
In many ways, Apollo's initiation business, Atlas, the center, sold the old GE capital ten years ago, which helped fill a portion of the old GE capital. Now it provides a variety of loans for inventory and equipment, vehicles and fleets, mortgages, investment funds, and building digital infrastructure. Apollo's co-president John Zito told A Atlas Deal Grant's interest rate watcher The investor meeting a year ago “will be seen as the most innovative M&A deal in the past five years.”
At present, the future is here, and it seems normal. The question is: Is there an estimate of private credit, and if so, when will it cause private credit and what will cause it? Robert O'Leary, co-CEO of Oaktree Capital, said in a May 2 interview with Bloomberg O'Leary that some limited private credit fund partners are expected to decline and they have begun selling their shares at a discount of 50 cents, and he said that if and when, forcing a sell, he said, it could get worse.