Jon Gray: And then the question was around individual investor, well, new products, yes. We are I don’t know if we’re prepared to talk about the latest funds, but we do think there’s more opportunity. Doing what we do today at greater scale in a different range of products, I think later this year, we’ll launch something new. And one of the areas we’ve already started small in Europe with some other products. There’s a lot of opportunity. Investors are just discovering individual investors just discovering the benefits of alternatives. The semi-liquid structures are new to many investors. And we think this is a long process. Our major competitive advantage is we started this much earlier than other people. We have a very large private wealth organization.
Joan Solotar and her team have done a terrific job many people around the world. We’ve built up relationships with financial advisers. And then I think the thing that is hard to capture our numbers is the power of the Blackstone brand we were able to start products. It’s no different than us doing insurance on a capital-light basis. Our ability to create new products and for financial advisers and their customers to allocate more to us because of the confidence in the brand is really important. And so the real consideration for us is when we launch a new product, we have to make sure the structure is right and that the returns we generate are sufficient because ultimately, this is a very long-term partnership with the financial advisers and their underlying clients.
So what we do has to work, and that’s why we’re so focused, and we’re deliberate in terms of the way we launch new products, but we definitely see more opportunity over time.
Operator: We’ll go next to Rufus Hone with BMO Capital Markets.
Rufus Hone: Maybe if you could spend a minute on the FRE margin. You’ve done so 58% through the first half of 2023. How do you think about that through the back half of the year? And if you could give some color around the expense side. You’ve shown some discipline on the fee-related comp ratio I guess, can you help us think about core expense growth through the rest of the year? Any detail there would be really helpful.
Michael Chae: Sure. As we’ve said pretty consistently, we encourage everyone to look at full year periods, not entry in our quarterly periods with respect to margins. There’s puts and takes from quarter-to-quarter and intra-year. So again, I’d say looking at full year 2023, we would just reiterate our prior comments around margin stability as compared to fiscal ’22, the full year. In terms of components, I think you referenced this, recognizing that we reported other operating expense down 2% in Q2, and that we do think that we bring a pretty disciplined approach to managing our costs. There are a couple of caveats on that as you think about the second half. As you know, OpEx is seasonally higher in the second half typically and also OpEx growth in the first half of the year.
benefited from the absence of COVID costs in this first half versus the presence of it a year ago. And so we’re all happy to say we’re through those now, but the second half OpEx growth rate will not have that benefit. So that’s a little bit of texture around it. But around both margin overall comp ratio overall, I would just point you to the kind of full year period.
Operator: We’ll go next to Arnaud Giblat with BNP.
Arnaud Giblat: If I could come back to private credit, you talked a lot about the golden moment here. It certainly looks like when we look at the yields and terms. I’m just wondering about deployment, which has been understandably slow. How does this evolve going forward? I suppose it’s linked to capital markets healing in which case, perhaps there’s a comeback from the delevered loan market and more competition, so the market share shift. I’m just wondering how to think about that.
