Is the worst over, Ana Maria?

Okay, so one key thing here, Matt, redemptions have been a big headline in terms of individual investors trying to pull their money out of credit funds.

What Blackstone's earnings showed was that new money going into private credit slowed for the second straight quarter.

Simultaneously, the inflows into other private investment categories like private equity and real estate increased.

The company attributed what occurred to the retail channel, essentially individual investors, who have now slowed putting more new money into its private credit business.

And similarly, yesterday, Blue Owl also showed a, a slowdown, um, in money raised for its credit business, one point eight billion into Q of this year versus five point eight billion a year prior.

Pretty meaningful slowdown.

What do you think? Uh, is that gonna turbocharge these stocks again?

What was this case about?

Much of this comes down to interchange fees.

So every time that consumers pay with a credit card, the merchant pays the bank that issued your credit card what's called an interchange fee.

These fees vary, but they're often between 2% to 2.5% of the purchase price.

Merchants pay tens of billions of dollars in these fees every year.

These costs have been rising so much for merchants because more and more consumers have switched from cash and debit cards to credit cards.

Two, it's because more and more people are shopping with rewards cards, and it's because credit cards with rewards have higher interchange fees than credit cards that don't have rewards programs.

So this legal settlement has enabled merchants to reject some of these cards if they want to, but have they said that they won't take rewards cards?