"In June 2024, the Capital Markets Bureau of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners—the standard-setting body behind state insurance regulation in the United States—published a special report on the private ratings spreading through American insurers’ bond portfolios. Its analysts had examined 109 private credit securities that the NAIC’s own Securities Valuation Office had previously assessed and that later received confidential ratings from commercial rating agencies. The comparison produced one of the most lopsided data sets a financial regulator has published in years: 106 of the 109 securities, roughly 97 percent, carried a private rating higher than the SVO’s original assessment.¹ Of the securities rated higher, thirty-eight—36 percent—were more than three notches above the regulator’s view. Eight sat six or more notches higher, the distance separating a speculative single-B credit from an investment-grade triple-B, and every one of those eight ratings had been issued by a smaller rating agency.¹"

"Every valuation model, every credit decision, and every index weighting in the American capital markets rests on one page that investors never independently verify: the auditor's opinion. The rest of a financial report is open to challenge—by analysts, by counterparties, by forensic specialists such as ourselves. The opinion is different. It is the verification itself, the point at which the market stops checking and starts trusting. That is why the following development deserves considerably more attention than it has received. As of the middle of 2026, ten of the twenty largest accounting firms in the United States are backed by private equity capital. Nearly half of the thirty largest have taken outside investment or restructured themselves to accommodate it. And in June of this year, KKR agreed to acquire a majority interest in Crowe—the twelfth-largest firm in the country and, until then, one of the more prominent holdouts—in a transaction reported at nearly $3 billion."

"On the surface, 2025 was the year private equity's liquidity problem began to heal. The global secondary market cleared a record $240 billion in transaction volume, a 48 percent increase over the prior year and the largest annual total ever recorded.¹ Exit values surged. Sponsors circulated the improvement in fundraising decks. Yet beneath the headline, the cash-on-cash reality facing limited partners barely moved: distributions as a percentage of net asset value came in at roughly 14 percent for 2025, a level last seen during the 2008–2009 financial crisis, marking the fourth consecutive year below 15 percent—an industry record for sustained illiquidity."