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The youngest champion in F1 history, and the move everyone in Italy is waiting for

Champion: practically yes, but not yet official. Antonelli won in Austin on Sunday (25 October) and was made to wait at least a week for the title. With five races to go, he is 123 points ahead of his nearest rival, with a maximum of 125 points still available. He clinches the title in Mexico next Sunday if he finishes anywhere in the top nine. That would make him F1's youngest champion in only his second season, and the first Italian world champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953. Even a bad weekend in Mexico only delays it.

My view: the real obstacle is not Ferrari's appetite but the logic of the situation. Mercedes is the dominant car under the 2026 rules, and Mercedes has backed him since he was a child. A newly crowned 20-year-old champion has no sporting reason to leave a winning car for a Ferrari that is going through a troubled second half of the season. A move is more plausible after 2027, and then only if Ferrari closes the performance gap or Mercedes falls back. The emotional pull of an Italian champion in red is real, but it is a story for 2028 and beyond, not for now.

A federal appeals court Monday rejected a Trump administration request to immediately require California to set aside mail-in ballots it receives from 20,000 people the federal government says might not be U.S. citizens.

A panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the Justice Department wasn’t entitled to an emergency order segregating the ballots, in a case the DOJ just filed 11 days ago and hasn’t yet been considered by a trial judge.

The panel said the administration’s “claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one” and that it could have filed its lawsuit earlier in its monthslong battle with California over the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls.

The order came after an unusual Sunday hearing in which judges grilled a Justice Department lawyer about the timing of the agency’s suit and the administration’s claims about noncitizen voting.

One of the appeals court judges who ruled against the administration, Trump appointee Mark Bennett, said the Constitution gives California the power to manage its voter rolls and run its elections.

The other judge in the majority was Gabriel Sanchez, a Biden appointee, who during the hearing questioned the reliability of the Trump administration’s claims that up to 20,000 ballots could be cast by “likely noncitizens.”

Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, dissented, saying the federal government was entitled to a ruling in its favor because it “has a sovereign interest” in stopping illegal voting and California wasn’t helping.

Voting is already under way in California, where every active registered voter receives a mail-in ballot. The state also begins processing those ballots ahead of Election Day—although it doesn’t actually count them until the polls close. Trump seized on California’s slow ballot-counting in the state’s summer primary to call into question the validity of the results.

U.S. Justice Department lawyer Matthew Donnelly said in the Sunday hearing that the administration needed an injunction “as soon as possible, based on the amount of votes that are being processed as we speak.”

Trump and top administration officials have alleged that hundreds of thousands of ineligible people are registered to vote around the country, focusing especially on people they think to be noncitizens.

California has said that it prohibits noncitizens from voting, and that state voters had to repeatedly attest to their U.S. citizenship to cast ballots.

The Trump administration faces a major obstacle to proving noncitizens are participating in elections: Because states compile and maintain voter rolls, only they have complete information about who is registered and actually casts ballots.

A federal judge in Santa Ana, Calif., the Clinton-appointed U.S. District Judge David Carter, is set to hear arguments Tuesday on whether to block the ballots from being counted. Whatever Carter rules is likely to be appealed back to the Ninth Circuit.

Software firms account for about a third of the risky corporate loans due in 2028 and 2029

Private-equity firms are scrambling to avoid big losses from a potential wave of defaults by the companies they own.

Fund managers are racing to negotiate loan extensions on much of a $300 billion wall of debt that is coming due starting in 2028. It is a pressing need that is intensifying because rising interest rates have made refinancing more expensive this year. And much of it is for software companies at risk of being eclipsed by artificial-intelligence companies such as Anthropic, which launched a giant IPO Monday.

Buyout fund managers that fail to get loan extensions risk having the companies they own taken over by creditors and their investments wiped out.

“There are going to be businesses that get the keys tossed back to the bank and don’t make it,” said Hugh MacArthur, chairman of Bain & Co.’s global private-equity practice.

Most companies refinance large obligations 18 to 24 months in advance as a precaution, whittling down the amount of debt coming due in that time frame. Companies owned by private equity have found that harder to do, creating an unusually high “maturity wall” in coming years.

About $140 billion in risky corporate loans are scheduled to mature in 2028 and another $160 billion in 2029. By comparison, from 2023 to 2025, there was an average of about $60 billion due in two years, according to data from PitchBook.

Software companies account for about one-third of the loans coming due in 2028 and 2029, in large part because private-equity funds binged on buyouts of the technology companies over the past decade. Private-credit firms that made many of the loans are also under pressure from default risk.

Private-equity firms built the foundations of the debt wall in 2021, when low interest rates during the pandemic fueled a record year for megadeals like the $11.8 billion takeover of cybersecurity company McAfee. Much of the money the firms borrowed for their buyouts came in the form of seven-year loans, since fund managers typically aim to flip their purchases in that time frame.

That calculus hit a snag after the Federal Reserve started hiking rates in 2022, then grew even tougher this year as Treasury bond yields skyrocketed. When borrowing costs rise, it becomes harder for the firms to profitably sell their companies. The longer the companies go unsold, the more urgent it becomes to refinance their debt. But higher rates can make new loans prohibitively expensive, especially for the weakest companies.

About one quarter of loans still due in 2028 and 2029 have junk ratings of CCC-plus or below, one of the lowest rungs of the ratings ladder, according to data from PitchBook.

“The difference this time versus what we’ve seen for the past 15 years is that interest rates are higher,” said Mark Jenkins, head of global credit at Carlyle Group. “You had an incredible market to refinance in, but we don’t anymore and there’s nothing in my mind that says rates are going down for the foreseeable future.”

Solera, a maker of software for vehicle maintenance, has about $8 billion in loans coming due in 2028 and 2029. Vista Equity Partners, which acquired the company in 2016, had planned an initial public offering in 2024 that would have repaid or extinguished the debt, but the deal failed to launch.

S&P Global Ratings last year downgraded Solera loans to CCC-plus, citing weak earnings and a heavy debt load. If the company were to default, it isn’t just Vista that would take a hit.

A broad mix of investors owned Solera’s debt, including private-credit players such as Apollo Global Management and Ares Management and mutual-fund titans like Fidelity Investments and Pimco. Prices of the loans plunged at the start of the year, then rebounded, but they still trade at discounts ranging from 93 to 77 cents on the dollar, according to data from Solve, reflecting uncertainty about how they will be repaid.

Bank of America said in a report Friday that near-term maturity walls have risen sharply to the highest levels since 2013. It forecasts that the default rate for below-investment-grade corporate loans will double next year to 4% and that creditors will recover less on those bad loans.

Private-equity firms typically expect some of their investments to flop. But if defaults exceed expectations, that will weigh down performance that has already been in decline for years, slashing returns paid out to investors like pensions, insurers and wealthy individuals.

Returns for private-equity funds have dropped below 10% in recent years from around 15% when interest rates were nearly zero, PitchBook data show.

“Private-equity firms are going to need to reposition their companies’ balance sheets and make often very tough calls on what they want to do with those companies,” said Alexander Edlich, a senior leader in McKinsey’s private-capital practice.

To stave off creditors, some firms are using cash from new funds to invest in ailing companies as a sweetener to extend due dates on loans.

Late last year, Clearlake tried to refinance $2.2 billion in loans coming due in December 2027 and 2028 for symplr, a healthcare software company it bought in 2018. The largest loan holders, including Ares Management and Sixth Street Partners, balked. Some had marked the loans down to about 66 cents on the dollar, and they demanded Clearlake increase its investment in symplr first.

Clearlake, which had just raised a $15 billion fund, gave the company $175 million in exchange for preferred shares. Lenders extended due dates for the debt to 2030 and 2031, made an additional loan of roughly $100 million and agreed that symplr could defer some interest payments.

The compromise ensures Clearlake’s control for a few more years and allows lenders to increase their valuations of symplr’s loan.

The deal, announced on Monday, is the biggest ever to raise money for AI infrastructure

Hock Tan was running out of patience.

The CEO of chip maker Broadcom AVGO 2.33%increase; up pointing triangle had spent nearly two months trying to get banks to commit over $40 billion to the largest artificial-intelligence debt deal ever. It was meant to allow Anthropic to lease specialized chips that Broadcom is developing with Google.

Though Anthropic was the main beneficiary of the deal, the startup needed help from its bigger commercial partners to raise the money. Together, Anthropic and Broadcom were trying to close the deal ahead of Anthropic’s filing for its widely anticipated initial public offering.

Broadcom, the supplier of chips to Anthropic, was at the center of the action. Thanks to its sterling credit rating, it had already agreed to provide some financial guarantees to make banks more comfortable with the sizable risk of lending over $40 billion. But over the past few weeks, some of the banks grew increasingly anxious about participating in the deal, known as “Project North Star,” people familiar with the matter said.

Given the rise in interest rates and growing difficulties in the markets for artificial intelligence ventures, some banks felt they weren’t being compensated enough to take the risk and considered pulling out altogether, the people said.

In the end, Broadcom’s CEO held 11th-hour talks with bank executives over the weekend to get them to finalize their commitment to the deal and also agreed to higher interest rates on the loans, the people familiar with the matter said.

Banks also got more comfort around the guarantees from Broadcom that will protect them from losses in case Anthropic defaults on the loans, the people said. The deal, led by Bank of America, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley, was announced late Monday after Anthropic released its IPO filing. Another chunk of debt, partially financed by Blackstone, brought the total commitments to $63 billion.

Broadcom’s role on different sides of the transaction—supplier, guarantor, negotiator—and the CEO’s intervention speak to the interlinked nature of the big AI bets transforming the economy and the high stakes for all involved.

Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI have voracious demand for chips to power their AI models, but they can’t just buy all of them on their own. Broadcom and other intermediaries are now helping them raise billions of dollars, but even with their support, raising money for artificial intelligence is becoming more difficult.

Banks and other investors want to limit exposure to the industry, which some believe is exhibiting signs of a financial bubble. Higher interest rates are also making it harder to raise capital, giving lenders an upper hand as they can pick and choose which deals to finance.

In the North Star deal, a shell company is borrowing the $63 billion to buy the chips designed by Broadcom and Google, known as tensor processing units. Anthropic’s lease payments are used to repay the loans, and Broadcom uses its balance sheet heft to guarantee that lenders will get their money back. Since the borrower is the shell company, Broadcom only assumes risk if Anthropic can’t make its payments.

The $63 billion deal is historic in several respects beyond size. Banks and private-credit firms like Blackstone, which regularly compete with each other, came together on the biggest ever financing of artificial intelligence infrastructure. The banks also plan to distribute half of their debt, around $22 billion, to the investment-grade bond market, the deepest pool of capital in the world.

One risk: The banks don’t plan to sell any bonds to fund managers until later next year when the chips are delivered, people familiar with the matter said. If interest rates rise sharply in the interim, the banks could have to sell the debt at a loss because they have promised to cap the interest rate of the loans. Some banks may choose to keep the loans rather than selling at a loss, two bankers close to the deal said.

On top of that, North Star involves another $18 billion in riskier debt that won’t carry a Broadcom guarantee, half of which will be financed by Blackstone. Private-credit firms, insurers and hedge funds have bought similar deals over the past year but intensifying volatility in financial markets related to AI may curb their willingness to take on the risk tied solely to Anthropic.

North Star is the sequel to another Anthropic and Broadcom chip-financing deal called “Big Sky.” Apollo financed some of the riskier parts of that deal and still hasn’t been able to complete some deals with investors to unload debt, people familiar with the situation said.

“North Star” is part of one of the many arrangements critics have dubbed “circular financing” as AI companies race to build data centers. In Anthropic’s IPO prospectus, the company estimated that it will pay more than $125.2 billion to lease Broadcom chips, and Broadcom and Google have respectively committed to provide $42 billion and $20 billion to Anthropic.

One reason it has been hard for arrangers of the deal to persuade other banks to pitch in: Debt markets are getting indigestion from hundreds of billions of dollars of AI-related bonds and loans. Many banks are still trying to unload loans they already committed to, limiting capacity to make new ones, debt fund managers say.

The flood of supply—combined with investors’ mounting fears that some AI bets will go bad—have made the loans a tougher sell. Some banks have traded the loans to clients at a loss to free up capital, while others are holding on, limiting their ability to do new deals. The logjam is leaving some banks stuck with loans made to riskier players in the AI ecosystem.

Morgan Stanley has been struggling to place a roughly $300 million bond backed by loans it made to help finance a data center project in Kansas City dubbed “Project Blitz” operated by Lambda, the debt fund managers said. Lambda is a “neocloud” startup, like Coreweave, that uses borrowed money to buy chips and rent their computational power to AI developers.

Morgan Stanley has found few takers for the Project Blitz bonds despite roughly doubling the yield they will pay, the debt fund managers said.