Alex Blostein: My question is around BXPE. Really strong momentum out of the gate, obviously, $2.7 billion that you guys highlighted this quarter and over the last couple of months. What’s the vision for this product, I guess, in terms of both capacity and maybe the appropriate size for the strategy as well as the pace at which you feel comfortable taking in inflows? And I don’t want to draw too much parallel with BREIT, obviously, very different product, very different customer base. But thinking of that one, I think, peaking at north of $70 billion, how are you thinking about the size and opportunity for BXPE?
Jon Gray: Well, I think it’s a great question, Alex. One of the things we did when we designed BXPE was to make the platform as broad as possible so that we could scale the product and we could be flexible on behalf of investors in terms of where we deployed it. So control large scale private equity is part of it; US, Europe, Asia is part of it; Tactical Opportunities, more hybrid equity, part of it; life sciences growth, part of it; secondaries, infrastructure, some opportunistic credit. It’s a very broad platform and it enables us to deploy a lot. One of the advantages of Blackstone is just our scale and the amount of deal flow we see across all these different areas. And particularly our connectivity with many other sponsors in the private equity space through our secondaries, our credit business, our GP stakes business, we can be great partners to those folks.
Obviously, we can manufacture a lot of transactions ourselves. So we think the potential scale here is quite large. You pointed out BREIT scale, we’re over $30 billion of equity, nearly $60 billion of assets in BCRED. We think this can grow a lot. The key is we have to deliver strong performance to the underlying customers. We have to be disciplined in how we deploy capital and thoughtful. I think we’ve been doing that. I think we’ll continue to do that. And that’s what gives us a lot of confidence, which is investors want exposure to private equity, individual investors want a little bit of a different structure, and that’s why I think BXPE is so attractive. So I think as we come out of this period over the last two years where there’s been a lot of caution and negativity, as market sentiment improves, as we show the strong performance from our other individual investor products, I think there’s a potential here of pretty good size.
Again, we’ve got to do a good job deploying capital but I’ve got a lot of confidence, particularly given the breadth of the platform. So the short answer is I think this can grow to be much larger than it is today.
Operator: We’ll go next to Dan Fannon with Jefferies.
Dan Fannon: Michael, last quarter, the message for this year on margins was stability. The first quarter was flat with last year. As you think about the momentum in the business that you highlighted and the prospects for growth and growth in AUM, how are you thinking about margins as you think about the rest of the year?
Michael Chae: I think my message is consistent. First of all, in terms of the actual result, as you noted in the first quarter, quite stable, quite consistent, quite in line with both the first quarter a year ago and the full year 2023. I think, as always, we guide people to look not at individual quarters but at sort of the — on a full year basis. And I think on that basis, we would again encourage people to think about this as — reinforce margin stability as a guidepost. And then, again, consistent with our message over a long time, on a longer term basis, we do think there’s operating leverage built into our model. We obviously actively manage our cost structure. And we think long term, there is a — it’s a robust margin position that we’ll scale and leverage over time. So back to where we started, I would reinforce margin stability as the message and over the long term, feel optimistic about the ability to increase that.
Operator: We’ll go next to Glenn Schorr with Evercore ISI.
Glenn Schorr: I got a question to peel back the onion a little bit on this commentary on bank partnership. So when we watch you do something like Barclays where you’ve taken a credit card book and give to your insurance clients, that makes sense to us, that’s like a cash transaction, it’s tangible. So we read a little more about the rising of synthetic risk transfer trends. And I’m just curious, that’s something that’s obviously harder for us to follow. It gives us shivers. It reminds us about 16 years ago. Curious of your thoughts on how much SRT is going on in the industry, how much you do, and maybe you can talk about what type of partnerships you envision going forward?
Jon Gray: SRTs are an area we’re very active. I think we’re the market leader today in terms of working with our bank partners. For them, these are capital relief transactions, as you know, where you’re sharing in or taking first loss positions. We’ve been doing this with a variety of banks who are highly creditworthy institutions. One of the advantages we have is the strength we have across asset ownership and also corporate and real estate credit. So if we do these with bank partners, we can go through them in detail. The most active area has been subscription lines to date, which as you probably know, subscription lines to private equity firms have had virtually no defaults over the last 30, 40 years. So we like that area.
