Mark Walter急寻交易，Shein筹备香港IPO

Live from Bloomberg's world headquarters in New York City. We're tracking the key players, the major moves and the capital flows shaping global market. This is Bloomberg deals. Welcome to another episode of Bloomberg Deals, the only show dedicated to corporate action reshaping markets. This hour, my exclusive conversation with Matt McClure of Goldman Sachs is his insight into how boardrooms are signaling a readiness for even more deals.

And an investigation by federal prosecutors, prompting billionaire Mark Walters to explore a range of hasty deals. We're going to bring you the latest. And new details emerging about anthropic ahead of a planned IPO, its revenue and credit facility, both of them growing rapidly. Let's look at today's big deals. And to do that, I am here with Bloomberg chief Wall Street correspondent Trina Rajan and Bloomberg finance editor Catherine Galinsky.

Great to see both of you. And first, we want to take a look at a source of some of the notable deals over the last several days. I know both of your teams have been looking at this, and this is Mark Walters. Just remind our audience is holding company 20 has been looking at to pull off a range of deals as the DOJ investigates loans on his insurer's balance sheet treat. Let me start with you. Um, why has the DOJ been investigating?

Let's just start with the fact that really kicked off a lot of these sales. I mean, just to take a quick step back, if you go this time last week, that was when the Lakers news broke that the Los Angeles Lakers were getting sold less than a year after Mark Walter took control of that team. And that's when a lot more questions came to the floor. And that takes us back to the news that Bloomberg has been on for a little bit longer than that, that Mark Walter and his business empire has been under federal scrutiny.

We heard from his insurers that earlier this year they got subpoenas from the DOJ, and they told us that the DOJ and the SEC is carrying out a parallel investigation to figure out how those insurers will making loans to other parts of Walter's business without tagging them as related party, without tagging them as affiliated assets. You are allowed to make such loans, but your regulator needs to know because there are certain other hoops that you have to jump through.

And when they redid the numbers, they reclassified almost $20 billion in loans. That affiliated assets went from about 3% of the insurer's balance sheet and one of the bigger insurers to 40%. Obviously, that's going to raise a lot of questions. And in the last week we've seen the repercussions play through the liquor sale, it's now clear, was part of a bid to accelerate these efforts to try and pay down these loans, to try and restructure these loans so that they can clean up the insurer's balance sheet.

And that's why we've seen a flurry of activity and and talks about the flurry of activity. Again, you've been joining me on open interest this week. It's like every single day there's something new that that's been sold off. What about his relationship to Guggenheim and how that factors into all of this. Well, again, the Mark Walter business empire, the only reason we could keep calling it that sprawling business empire.

He's adopt this holding company that controlled insurers Delaware life and Clear Spring that controls key financial entities. Guggenheim partners, most notable on Wall Street for Guggenheim Investments, the $367 billion asset manager. And Guggenheim Securities, the broker dealer run by the former best on CEO Alan Schwartz. In addition to that, he has a lot of merchant banking interests, investments in different spaces, whether it's related to ie reviving the woolly mammoths and several other cutting edge technology investments.

And on top of that, he's famous on Wall Street, on Main Street for all the sports ownerships the Dodgers, Lakers, Chelsea, Cadillac, the list goes on. All the sports that you like, all of the sports. But Mark Walter plays a key role. So this is a perfect intersection of Main Street. It's a great point to put it. Like everything you could think of in the finance and sports universe like Mark Walters, then they're in some shape or form.

I know the other story. Both. Both of you been looking at it is Goldman Sachs in this new spot of deal that feels have been coming from them? Catherine most recently this week. It's related to real estate. Yeah. And it's kind of a fun one. It's a very wonky part of real estate, but it'll be interesting to see how it kind of plays out. It's really been this part of push by, um, David Solomon to sort of reshape their asset manager in their wealth management business.

Look it up. You know, it's just a few weeks ago there was news about Neo's investment in ETF manager. And now we have sort of this real estate bet that they're trying to get into. So you have at the beginning of David Solomon's tenure some deals. There's a whoa. Does this suggest that it's picking back up or these just like little nibbles and doesn't really speak to that future? They are little nibbles. But I would say it definitely sounds like it's picking back up.

And it'll be really interesting to see as we go, you know, is it more of this sort of wealth management and asset management push, or does he try and go in other ways? You know, I think wealth management has been such a lucrative part of the business for Goldman and a lot of other Wall Street banks. but we'll be keeping a close eye for where they go next. All right. Thank you both so much for joining. Really appreciate your time.

That's Bloomberg's Catherine Glinski and Sri Natarajan. Now we have a lot of retail earnings out today. There's target. We're going to get Walmart tomorrow. More retail names again reporting this week. Bloomberg's Norm Melinda is here to show us one fast fashion name that might soon have to report earnings with an IPO set in Hong Kong. Norah thanks. Danny Sheehan is finally getting closer to a public listing. But at a valuation that's a fraction of what the company was once worth.

It's reportedly targeting about 26 to $27 billion in its Hong Kong IPO, with hopes to raise around $2 billion. And just look at that chart. Sheehan was valued at roughly $100 billion just back in 2022. So this is all a pretty dramatic reset. The company has been dealing with slowing growth, tougher competition from TMO and higher costs. This all particularly after tariffs pushed the price of goods higher. And she had actually lost $99 million in its first quarter.

That's compared to a nearly $400 million profit just a year prior. So this IPO was really a test of whether investors are willing to put a new price on one of the biggest names in fast fashion, following a pretty significant fall from its peak. Nora, thank you very much for that. Speaking of IPOs, back here in the U.S., we are awaiting a hotly awaited IPO of anthropic. Their annualized revenue is topping $65 billion.

They announced that ahead of their highly anticipated IPO. Also learning that anthropic credit facility is set to rise above its $10 billion target. For more on these stories, we are joined by Bloomberg reporter Anthony Hughes. Anthony, again, it's a drip feed of information as we await this IPO. What is the latest? Well, yeah, there's lots of information about anthropic, a lot of crosscurrents and stories about, you know, how they're going and relative to OpenAI.

But it seems like, uh, OpenAI is really allowing anthropic to go first here. And the talk is that anthropic is looking at perhaps a late September, early October IPO, whether that's when it launches and prices and, you know, it's obviously going to be the big event of the post Labor Day period for the full equity capital markets, for the IPO market. And, uh, you know, a lot of other people who want to go public and have to work their way around that.

And, and it's going to potentially suck up a lot of capital. But we've seen with Space