The Wall Street Skinny

Kristen and Jen
  • 4.9 (229)
  • INVESTING
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Where Bloomberg meets Page Six.  Join us -- Kristen and Jen -- two former Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers investment bankers who take the most complex deals, market moves, and stories in finance and distill them into what actually matters.  From conversations with the biggest names in investing to deep dives people can’t stop sharing (not to mention the occasional HBO Industry red carpet), this is the show Wall Street is obsessed with.

  1. 2D AGO

    The INSANE Loophole GameStop Could Use to Pull Off Buying eBay (4x its Size)

    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 this look less like an LBO and more like a SPAC, the precedent Bill Ackman set when he paid $10 million to get the SEC to approve his SPARC, and why levering eBay up at 7–10x puts the combined company at material bankruptcy risk over the next few years. We also get into why eBay might actually want a version of this deal (just not this version), and whether a  private equity firm could step in with a cleaner bid,  Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

    25 min

  2. 5D AGO

    GameStop Just Bid $56 Billion for eBay. What is ACTUALLY Going On????

    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, half stock — roughly $56bn total GameStop's market cap: under $11bn Cash needed: $28bn (GameStop has $9bn on hand + a "up to $20bn" TD Bank commitment letter) Combined company leverage: ~10x EBITDA (a massive LBO is typically 7x — banks don't do 10x) The $17bn equity hole: where is it actually coming from? We compare this to the Paramount/Warner Bros deal (spoiler: that one works because Larry Ellison is bankrolling it), unpack GameStop's curious 5% derivative stake in eBay, and explore the theories floating around — CEO comp package triggers, a possible "uno reverse" play to get eBay to bid for GameStop instead, and echoes of the Porsche/Volkswagen hostile takeover. Plus: Ryan Cohen's background, the dismissed Bed Bath & Beyond pump-and-dump lawsuit, and why no sovereign wealth fund has a strategic reason to write the check. Got a theory on what's really going on? Drop it in the comments. Want to learn how to actually run accretion/dilution analyses and tear deals apart like this? Check out our 35+ hour self-paced Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals course, taught by Kristen. https://thewallstreetskinny.com/premium-self-study/ Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

    18 min

  3. APR 30

    Every New Fed Chair Has Crashed the Market. A New One is Coming May 15th

    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 on monetary policy, and his philosophy represents a real regime change — a more unified Fed, less hand-holding of markets, a smaller balance sheet, and a return to the Fed staying in its lane. We walk through who actually sits on the FOMC and how voting works, what quantitative easing really is and why we started doing it in the first place, the difference between monetary and fiscal policy (and why people keep confusing the two), and why "lower rates" doesn't mean the same thing to all people — including why a Warsh Fed could theoretically deliver a cut to the Fed funds rate alongside higher mortgage rates. We also get into the so-called "Chairman's Curse" — the eerie pattern of catastrophe that has marked nearly every Fed chair transition in modern history — and what event-day risk around FOMC meetings might look like under a chair who wants to communicate less, not more. Plus: Powell's surprising decision to stay on as a governor and the uncomfortable question nobody wants to ask out loud — if we're never going to take our medicine on the deficit, what is the role of the Federal Reserve actually supposed to be? Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

    49 min

  4. APR 25

    Financial Times Reporter TELLS ALL: Why Private Credit is Worse than Credit in 2008

    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 deal would actually look like, why existing bondholders could get layered all over again, and how the Vici REIT spinoff reshaped the entire capital structure in ways most headlines completely miss when they quote the "$7 billion" offer price. But the bigger story is what's happening across private credit broadly. In the last few weeks alone, Blue Owl permanently gated a perpetual fund, Blackstone partners had to backstop redemptions, and BlackRock, Cliffwater, and Apollo have all gated funds. We push Sujeet on the question every allocator is wrestling with: is this a contained correction or the early innings of something systemic? We get into why first-lien recoveries have collapsed, why loan-only capital structures and uni-tranche debt have changed what "senior secured" actually means, the PIK toggle canary that's quietly ticking up, and why the alt managers trading at 40x forward earnings may have priced in a growth story that's about to meet its first real credit cycle. We also cover the fascinating bifurcation playing out in real time — record investment-grade issuance from Amazon, Honeywell, and others on one end, while BDCs gate retail investors on the other — and what it means for the push to get private credit into 401(k)s. Plus: the $80 million Wachtell-to-Kirkland lawyer poaching that Sujeet wrote about and why it might be the most underrated leading indicator of the next debt crisis.  Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

    46 min

  5. APR 20

    Creditor-on-Creditor Violence: Who Gets Destroyed, and Who Walks Away Rich?

    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 for stripping creditor rights that the entire industry now uses as standard operating procedure.  How do you move billions in assets out of a dying company and into a clean entity without the creditors being able to stop you? Who determines the value of what's being transferred when nobody is representing the other side? And how does Britney Spears end up at the literal center of a multibillion-dollar restructuring that kept this whole thing alive way longer than it should have survived? And the biggest question of all (why we think this episode is mandatory listening right now): what happens when this playbook gets deployed AGAIN, today? We're already seeing the early signs: record levels of corporate debt coming due, earnings getting squeezed by higher rates, and redemption requests piling up. So what does creditor-on-creditor violence actually look like in practice? How do the alliances form and break? Why did the investors who got screwed the hardest in the Caesars saga end up being the biggest winners by the time the dust settled? And if you're sitting in any kind of debt instrument right now, how do you know whether you're the one holding the cards or the one about to get shut out in the cold? Stay tuned for Part III, the conclusion of this 3-part series, where we'll be interviewing author and Financial Times reporter Sujeet Indap! Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

    46 min

  6. APR 16

    Private Equity Knows Something Private Credit Doesn't | Caesars $30B LBO is the Playbook

    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 investors on its head. This also happens to be the ultimate Private Equity & LBO deep dive as we start with the basics: what an LBO actually is, how it works, why private equity firms started to do club deals back in 2006/7 (hint...size) and how capital structures work at a high level. From there, Jen and Kristen walk through the actual structure of the Caesars deal — $6B in equity from Apollo, TPG, and 30+ co-investors (everyone from Goldman Sachs to the Michael J. Fox Foundation to Bob Kraft), $7B in bank loans, $6B in bridge-to-high-yield bonds, and $6.5B in commercial mortgage-backed securities sitting at the PropCo level. They explain what an OpCo/PropCo mean in laymen's terms, why it let Apollo juice leverage, why club deals fell out of favor in favor of co-invest structures, and how today's mega-LBOs (Electronic Arts, the Ellison family's Warner Bros. Discovery play) stack up against what was historic in 2007. This series is based on The Caesars Palace Coup by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes — not sponsored, just genuinely one of the best case studies out there on LBOs and distressed debt investing.  Stay tuned for Part 2, where Jen and Kristen get into everything that went wrong, the asset-transfer shenanigans, and the birth of creditor-on-creditor violence and how Britney Spears was the linchpin that kept it all together...until it all unraveled with the biggest names in investing, Apaloosa, Eliott, Oak Tree, Oak Hill, Paulson and more got in the ring.  In Part 3, we sit down with Sujeet Indap of the Financial Times to talk about what the Caesars deal means for the private credit market today, and what exactly is going on with Caesars who is back in the news with Carl Icahn and billionaire Tilman Fertitta out with competing offers. Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

    50 min

  7. APR 11

    Morgan Stanley's Head & CIO of Private Equity Solutions: The Ultimate Deep Dive into PE Investing

    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 performance?  - What's actually a "good" DPI, IRR, and TVPI - Why does every fund somehow claim to be top quartile?  She also pulls back the curtain on subscription credit lines and how GPs use them to juice early IRRs, gives us a definition of "fund of funds" and "co-investment" that actually makes sense, and settles the score on whether PE investing is really just "volatility laundering". As the walls around private equity are coming down, it’s important to understand which sectors are secretly crushing it, how managers actually get selected, the fee structures, and what the "democratization of private markets" really means for returns going forward. Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

    1h 6m

  8. APR 1

    Wall Street is Watching Something More Concerning than Oil

    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 federal government insolvent. It did not... the numbers they used aren't wrong — but the way they used them is, and we explain why you simply cannot apply corporate accounting rules to a sovereign government that prints its own currency and has a military. That said, we're not letting Washington off the hook. The fiscal picture is broken and we get into why. We wrap up with some of the wildest proposals circulating right now for how to fix the US debt problem — including one from self-proclaimed Bond King Jeffrey Gundlach that we're giving a hard pass. If you want the stuff that actually moves markets explained by people who used to sit on the desk, this is the episode. Subscribe to our Substack HERE: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny Check out the Fixed Income Sales, Trading and Investing Premium Self Study HERE: https://thewallstreetskinny.com/fixed-income-sales-trading-investing/#fixed-income-sales Shop our Self Paced Courses: Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

    43 min
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4.9
out of 5
229 Ratings

About

Where Bloomberg meets Page Six.  Join us -- Kristen and Jen -- two former Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers investment bankers who take the most complex deals, market moves, and stories in finance and distill them into what actually matters.  From conversations with the biggest names in investing to deep dives people can’t stop sharing (not to mention the occasional HBO Industry red carpet), this is the show Wall Street is obsessed with.

Information

  • Creator
    Kristen and Jen
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    242
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Wall Street Skinny
  • Show Website
    The Wall Street Skinny

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