Blackstone Hits Dealmaking ‘Escape Velocity’

With more than a trillion dollars of assets under management, Blackstone is the size of a G20 nation. Fittingly, its earnings report on Thursday featured some big, big numbers. There are the usual suspects: inflows of $71 billion in the final quarter, which pushed its capital base to nearly $1.3 trillion, yet another gargantuan record. Meanwhile, quarterly distributable earnings rose 4% year over year to $2.2 billion, impressing analysts who favor the free cash flow proxy metric. But the most crucial figu ...