Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In the middle of last month I wrote a brief note here about Blue Owl, a large manager of alternative assets with a lot of money at stake in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space.  We come around to Blue Owl again, because days ago Brown University announced it is cutting its stake in Blue Owl Capital Corp., one of the broad Blue Owl family of entities-- roughly cutting that stake in half.  This bugs me because: 1) it is such a large shift that ... 2) there is likely a reason for it -- somebody at Brown knows something about Blue Owl, and  3) I don't know what they know.  Indeed, it is my job to know what is up at such places as Blue Owl, and it looks like I'm missing out on something big.   Also, to be clear: this is NOT a "divestment" from Israel.  There is a student group at Brown that presses for that, and they have had their Gaza Solidarity Encampment, but so far they have had no success in affecting Brown's portfolio, and I don't know of any Blue...

 In finance journalism, the acronym HOTS stands for "Heard on the Street," the somewhat opinionated and somewhat gossipy column made famous, and made into a mover of markets, by Dan Dorfman in the 1960s.  Someone would advance the history of this branch of journalism if he could only write a comprehensive history of this column, from its earliest days in the 1930s to and through Dorfman's day to the notorious reign there of Foster Winans in the 1980s.  Anyway, Jonathan Weil writes it now. Weil, whose expertise as a forensic accountant has long given an edge to his journalism, defends the management of Blue Owl, a large alternative asset manager that specializes in private credit.  Private credit funds typically act as non-bank lenders to mid-market businesses. Blue Owl in particular has become controversial of late for its relative illiquidity. Specifically, it has lent a lot of money to firms on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, also known as the app econom...