Stephen Schwarzman on financial crisis
From The story of Blackstone Group and other life lessons from founder Stephen Schwarzman · · Forbes India
“I realized we had a global bubble in residential housing and what that did is once once I saw that you know I told everybody in the firm about it the next week and when we discussed it and we took a variety of decisions to not only not buy the the residential units in Spain but what we sold almost everything we could that affected was affected by residential real estate and then we just started selling all kinds of other things because the excess going on in the world was like clearly visible and we wanted to reduce our commitments and so that kind of you know sort of sales of things plus we invested a lot less so when we went into the financial crisis unlike most organizations in the world we were unusually well positioned so that when things collapsed we were able to focus on doing new things as opposed to dealing with problems of our own creation.”
On , Stephen Schwarzman, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder at Blackstone Inc, spoke about financial crisis during The story of Blackstone Group and other life lessons from founder Stephen Schwarzman on Forbes India.
About Stephen Schwarzman
Stephen Schwarzman, chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone, has been discussing the firm's record financial results and its positioning in private markets. On the Q4 2025 earnings call, he reported that Blackstone achieved its best results in 40 years, with distributable earnings of $1.75 per share and a 20% increase in full-year distributable earnings to $5.7 billion. He has emphasized the firm's role as a business builder rather than a business buyer, citing its growth into areas such as AI-related infrastructure, where he stated Blackstone has become the largest investor globally with a portfolio of over $150 billion in data centers. Schwarzman has also addressed the expansion of alternatives into defined contribution retirement plans, describing it as an area of focus following a U.S. administration executive order, and noted a strategic alliance with Wellington and Vanguard to create integrated public-private investment solutions. Schwarzman has commented on market conditions and the private credit sector. On the Q1 2025 call, he described uncertainty around tariffs as impacting investor sentiment, while asserting that Blackstone's business model is designed for periods of stress, citing its low net debt and $177 billion in dry powder. He has pushed back against external assertions that private credit poses systemic risk, noting that Treasury and Federal Reserve leaders have not seen such risk, and argued that defaults in focus resulted from bank-led credits, not private credit. On the Q1 2026 call, he stated that the firm raised $62 billion in inflows in the quarter, the highest in three years, and expressed confidence that private credit products can deliver premium returns over liquid markets. In a March 2026 interview at Citi, Schwarzman discussed building a high-performance culture, depersonalizing decision-making, and supporting employees through mistakes, as well as his philanthropic work including the Schwarzman Scholars program.