If you looked in the quarter, as I said, the two biggest investments we made were an investment in Northern Indiana utility business a couple of billion dollars we invested to help them facilitate the energy transition. And then we also had another $1 billion we put into Invenergy, our large-scale renewables developer. So I would say because the size of the market is growing so quickly and investor desire for exposure to this is growing as well, we think this can be a lot bigger. I don’t know if we have a number. We said publicly a couple of years ago that we expect to invest $100 billion over the decade, we said that two years ago. So I would say when you look at Blackstone over time, this will be an area of a lot of capital needs. And the good news is the investors want it.
It can be very large, very scalable, and so we expect that this will accelerate. The IRA in the US has made a big difference. There was $250 billion of large-scale renewable projects announced in the last years, and there was an equal amount announced in the last year basically since the IRA passing. So we would say very large scale opportunity and should result in a new area for us to grow and generate incremental fees and returns for investors.
Michael Chae: Brian, just to add to that with the numbers, Michael. The sort of fair market value of our energy transition portfolio today is over $20 billion, and there’s committed capital that shortly that’s going to be invested and increase that number. And obviously, we’ve funds pointed at investing in that area in the near term. So that number will grow. But in terms of what we own today, it’s in that ballpark. .
Brian Bedell: Yes. That’s great. And then just on the direct lending side, I know you said $100 billion, and you’ve got the — obviously, the bank partnerships and the strong pipeline. Any capacity constraints that would sort of limit the growth potential of that franchise just in the context, obviously, of the good trends versus the — with banks going back?
Jon Gray: Well, I think near term, the opportunity set is pretty large. We — private equity firms and other companies need this access to capital the certainty direct lending provides, I think it’s proven to be very valuable, particularly for new transactions. We would expect as deal volume picks up, this area should pick up as well. We’ve seen our pipeline grow more than double in the last 90 days in direct lending. We don’t see a reason why this should slow down. At some point, markets change and so forth. But if you look at direct lending as a percentage of the overall leverage lending and high-yield market, I still think there’s plenty of room for this to grow. So we think it’s early days still on this shift.
Operator: We’ll go next to Alex Blostein with Goldman Sachs.
Alex Blostein: So John, maybe a question on the broader capital markets environment. We’ve seen some green shoots with a couple of IPOs, a couple of deal announcements. So how are you sort of thinking about capital velocity for Blackstone the next, call it, six to 12 months or so? And importantly, as some of that kind of fly activity resumes, how do you expect that to reaccelerate fundraising? So meaning, are there some strategies that are likely to see more pent-up demand once this capital market cycle sort of resumes versus less. So just curious to kind of get your thoughts and environment/fundraising.
