The people, companies and trends shaping the global economy.

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The White House insisted that peace talks with Iran are ongoing, even as Tehran publicly rejected US overtures and issued fresh conditions of its own to end the conflict that’s wreaked havoc across the Middle East and global markets.

“The United States has been engaged over the last three days in productive conversations,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday. “You’re beginning to see the regime look for an exit ramp.”
“If Iran fails to accept the reality of the current moment,” Leavitt added, “Trump will ensure they are hit harder than they have ever been hit before. President Trump does not bluff and he is prepared to unleash hell.”

Her comments ran counter to Iran’s earlier statements through state-run media publicly rejecting Trump’s push for talks. Tehran is also seeking its own guarantees, including that the US and Israel won’t resume their attacks, reparations for war damages and recognition of its authority over the Strait of Hormuz, state-owned Press TV said.

Trump on Monday set a five-day deadline for Iran to negotiate a deal to end the war. Halfway through that period, there are lingering questions over the status of negotiations and the likelihood for a deal.

The US has compiled a 15-point peace proposal that Pakistan delivered to the Islamic Republic, according to people familiar with the matter, highlighting the urgency within Trump’s administration to resolve a conflict it started alongside Israel almost a month ago. Leavitt on Wednesday said there were “elements of truth” to the reported US proposal, but cautioned against speculating on anonymously provided plans.

Vice President JD Vance may travel to Pakistan for Iran talks this weekend, CNN reported. Asked for comment on that report, Leavitt said “this is a fluid situation, and speculation about meetings should not be deemed as final until they are formally announced by the White House.”

Today's show features:

• Michelle Jamrisko, Bloomberg News White House and National Security Editor
• Dan Letter, CEO of Prologis
• Rachel Metz, Bloomberg News AI Reporter on OpenAI Discontinues Support for Sora, Winds Down Disney Deal
• June Grasso, Bloomberg Law host, on Meta, Google Found Liable in Social Media Addiction Case

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When Elon Musk took the stage on Saturday to unveil his plans to get into semiconductor production, he didn’t spare the superlatives. No one has ever proposed anything quite like what Musk calls Terafab. The project, as outlined, would be a massive operation to build cutting-edge semiconductors for artificial intelligence, robotics and space forays. He would not only try to take on the best chip manufacturer in the world — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. — he wants to do it at volumes far beyond the industry’s current capacity. The scale boggles the mind. The project would require something like $5 trillion to $13 trillion in capital spending, according to estimates from Bernstein analysts. That would fund 140 to 360 new factories, each making 50,000 wafers per month in order to reach the 1 terawatt of annual computing capacity he proposed.

Max Chafkin, Bloomberg Businessweek Senior Reporter, discusses how Musk, by far the richest person in the world, has accomplished what others believed impossible before — creating a commercially viable rocket business with SpaceX, bringing electric vehicles to the mainstream with Tesla Inc., and delivering internet connectivity from space with Starlink.

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The people, companies and trends shaping the global economy.
Watch Carol and Tim LIVE every day on YouTube: http://bit.ly/3vTiACF.

Stephen Nesbitt was on no one’s list of Wall Street heavyweights when he bumped into a thirty-something salesman pitching the next big thing for wealthy investors: private credit.
Nesbitt — who, as it happened, had written a book on private debt — took the idea and ran with it.Within a few years, he and his son Blake transformed their modest consulting business, Cliffwater LLC, into an unlikely giant. Their strategy: rather than sweat the details of every direct loan themselves, they’d piggyback on the firms that did. They’d also invest in industry heavyweights, creating something akin to a fund-of-private-credit-funds.

Now the father-and-son team, who rode private credit on the way up, risk falling hard on the way down. As investors in private credit funds rush for the exits, Cliffwater has become one of the biggest question marks in the $1.8 trillion industry.

The worry isn’t so much that private loans will go bad all at once and crush the funds where Cliffwater has invested. It’s that antsy investors will keep asking for money back, prompting Cliffwater to dash for cash itself — instigating a vicious circle of redemptions and markdowns.
Concerns center around the $33 billion Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund, the largest of its kind in private credit. It’s what’s known as an interval fund, a type of closed-end vehicle that isn’t traded on an exchange but rather promises to buy back shares from investors at set intervals, usually quarterly, at net asset value. Cliffwater is legally obliged to buy back at least 5% every quarter if investors ask.That promise was a key selling point in good times. “Liquidity is the first-, second- and third-most important thing,” Blake Nesbitt emphasized at an industry roundtable this month.

Today's show features:

• Bloomberg Leveraged Finance reporters Ellen DiMauro and Olivia Fishlow on their Big Take story about Private Credit
• Ray Takeyh, Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at Council on Foreign Relations
• Former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross
• Drive to the Close with Emily Green Ellevest Head of Wealth Management

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