Weekly Market Summary

Extra Credit^*

• Private markets used to be an exclusive club reserved for pensions, endowments, and other large institutions. While the return potential has always been compelling, access came with high barriers: large minimums, limited transparency, and steep costs.
• Private markets have now grown to nearly $16 trillion in assets under management—almost triple their size since 2015. Several factors are driving this shift. For one, companies are staying private longer even while reaching the scale of public firms, which has drawn increased interest from allocators toward private equity or venture capital. The same is true in private credit, where more debt is being issued by private companies.
• While public markets still dominate in total assets, private markets now far exceed them in company count. In the U.S., there are roughly 4,400 publicly traded companies compared with more than 70,000 private equity- and venture-backed firms. That means private companies make up about 94% of the total company count.
• Bank-loan and high-yield bond default rates, excluding distressed exchanges, finished the month at 1.23% and 0.31%, down from 1.24% and up from 0.27% in February. This is also well below the long-term historical default rate of 3.1% for loans and 3.4% for high yield, and the historical post-GFC default rates of 2.3% and 2.5%, respectively.

Sources: Bloomberg and JP Morgan as of 5/30/25.