Vol. I · No. 014 Daily Edition Thursday, September 24, 2026
The Blind Pool
Private Markets · Brought Into Focus

The Blind Pool, free every weekday before the open. One tight read across the private-markets press.

Search
A private-markets search — scoped to the trade press, data houses, law firms & filings. Returns links; opens in a new tab.
Reading the links

Every headline here links out to the original reporting, and those sources differ in what they let you read. We mark each one so you know before you click. Register is the one worth acting on — those sites cost nothing but want an account, or will let you read a few pieces a month and then stop. Signing up takes a minute and is the difference between reading the story and hitting a wall.

Free Open — no account neededRegister Free, but wants an account or limits how many you read$ Paid subscription required
You are reading the edition of Thursday, September 24, 2026. Go to today’s edition →
Today’s Take The risk-free rate is the story: the ten-year broke 5.1% on Wednesday, its highest since 2007, which reprices every hurdle on this page at once. Beneath it the same two currents keep running — balance sheets buying what funds cannot sell, from Goldman circling Palmer Square to BlackRock and IFM closing on Stack at roughly $25bn and ADIA and Korea’s NPS anchoring Cheyne — and the routes meant to return cash narrowing further, with Bamboo’s listing pulled, hold periods at cycle highs, Apollo gating a third straight quarter and Partners Group weighing a continuation vehicle for loans that were supposed to repay themselves. 34 stories

The ten-year closed at 5.11% on Wednesday, with the two-year at 4.85% and the thirty-year at 5.40%, in a selloff driven by fiscal supply and a Fed that has just started raising again. This is the line running underneath everything else on the page. A higher risk-free rate lifts the hurdle every buyout and credit deal is measured against, widens the denominator gap for LPs already over-allocated to private markets, and raises funding costs across floating-rate direct lending and CLO liabilities. If 5% turns out to be a floor rather than a spike, marks still carrying a lower discount rate start to look generous. The Journal’s piece is paywalled; CNN and the wires carry the same move for free.

Wall Street Journal$
By the Numbers
5.11%
10-year Treasury yield
12 mo · 4.12 → 5.11
▲ US Treasury, Sep 23
4.00%
Fed funds target, upper bound
12 mo · 4.50 → 3.75 → 4.00
▲ FOMC Sep 16 / H.15 Sep 23
268bp
US high-yield spread, option-adjusted
▲ ICE BofA / FRED, Sep 22
10%
LP distribution yield vs 25% norm
▼ Ropes & Gray, H1 2026
$348B
PE NAV in funds 10+ years old
▲ PitchBook, end-2025
$121B
Secondaries volume, H1
▲ Evercore, H1 2026
As of Sep 24, 2026, before the open. Three of the six figures are live market readings checked this morning; three are periodic and are carried unchanged at their last published readings, with their as-of dates shown. The 10-year Treasury yield is the latest published daily reading — 5.11% on Sep 23, up from 4.96% on Sep 21 and Sep 22 — taken from the Treasury’s daily par yield curve. It is the highest close since 2007; the 2-year moved to 4.85% and the 30-year to 5.40% on the same day. The trend line uses monthly averages from September 2025 to August 2026 with the latest close as its final point, so the arrow marks the 12-month direction rather than the week’s. The policy line is the FOMC’s target range as a 12-month step line: the upper bound was 4.50% a year ago, cut three times to 3.75% by December, and raised 25bp to 4.00% on Sep 16, the first increase since 2023; the H.15 release dated Sep 23 shows the effective rate holding at 3.88% every day since Sep 17, and there has been no action since. The credit-spread line is the ICE BofA US High Yield index option-adjusted spread at 268bp on Sep 22 against 266bp on Sep 21 (FRED series BAMLH0A0HYM2), which is the most recent published observation and therefore does not yet reflect Wednesday’s move in Treasuries. The carried figures: the aged-fund NAV is PitchBook’s $348.5bn end-2025 reading for US private equity held in funds at least ten years old; the distribution yield and the $328bn of secondaries dry powder behind it are from Ropes & Gray’s H1 2026 secondaries review; secondaries volume is Evercore’s H1 2026 review.

§ Private Equity

Goldman moves to the front of the queue for Palmer Square’s $37bn credit book
Private Equity WireSep 23NewFree

Roughly $27bn of that book is CLOs, so the buyer is taking on a securitisation engine rather than a direct-lending franchise. LPs in Palmer Square vehicles should be reading their key-person and change-of-control language this week, and asking whether the BDC and CLO equity sleeves end up cross-sold through Goldman’s wealth channel.

§ Private Credit

Apollo’s $26bn wealth-channel credit fund gates a third straight quarter as requests ease to 14.7%
Private Equity WireSep 23NewFree

Gross subscriptions of about $0.2bn come nowhere near what investors asked to pull, so the vehicle keeps shrinking even as the queue shortens. Apollo’s own framing — that a 2026 redeemer will have had roughly three-quarters of their money back by year end — describes an orderly exit from the wealth channel rather than a run, and it caps the fee base the big platforms underwrote when they built retail distribution.

§ Real Assets & Infrastructure

§ Secondaries & CVs

Credit that was meant to repay itself heads into an €800m continuation vehicle
Private Equity WireSep 21Free

Assets from 2018 and 2020 credit funds plus three multi-asset vintages would move into a single Partners Group vehicle: the trapped-NAV playbook applied to debt, where self-liquidating paper was the whole argument against ever needing an extension. The question for the LPAC is why the loans are not simply running off.

§ LPs & Allocators

Texas Teachers opens a national search as Jase Auby sets a January exit
Chief Investment OfficerSep 22Register

Auby hands over a $225bn plan running one of the largest and most copied private programmes in US public pensions, about 130 basis points a year ahead of benchmark. The search that follows is effectively a referendum on whether that tilt and its principal-investing arm survive the handover.

§ Regulation & Tax

A Texas fund promised 12% on mobile homes the SEC says it never bought
InvestmentNewsSep 22Register

Wavemark Income Fund sold retail investors notes supposedly secured by manufactured housing, at guaranteed returns of 12 to 14 per cent. Small money by the standards of this page, but exactly the kind of retail private-fund failure that gets quoted back at anyone arguing to open 401(k)s to private assets.

§ Law Firm & Expert Insights

§ People & Firms