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C’est avec une confiance au plus bas que l’AS Monaco se déplace ce mardi sur la pelouse du Real Madrid, en Ligue des Champions. Malgré une qualification pour les 8es de finale de la Coupe de France obtenue face à Orléans (1-3) en 16es, le 10 janvier, les Monégasques pataugent complètement en Ligue 1. En cinq rencontres de championnat, l’équipe de Sébastien Pocognoli n’a enregistré qu’une victoire, suivie de quatre défaites, dont le dernier revers contre Lorient (1-3) à domicile vendredi. Le club du Rocher occupe actuellement une 9ᵉ place, dans le ventre mou du classement. « La pression je la prends » Avant le déplacement à Santiago Bernabéu, le coach monégasque a tenu à rappeler qu’il endossait la responsabilité des résultats de son équipe. Il a insisté sur le fait qu’il préférait voir la pression peser sur ses épaules plutôt que sur celles de ses joueurs. « La pression je la prends. C’est mon job de coach de l’assumer. Je suis là pour ça, pour assurer cette protection pour mes joueurs, pour qu’ils jouent libérés », a affirmé le coach belge en conférence de presse.

Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BIWhat do an employee at a dental imaging company, an English Premier League soccer player, and a saver with an account at BlackRock all have in common? They're all quietly connected to Wall Street's hottest investment class: private credit.The debt that most Americans have dealt with — from credit cards to mortgages — has been upfront: there are bills to pay, balances that are visible, and credit ratings that assess a borrower's creditworthiness. Private credit, or loans made to companies by private investor money gathered into a fund, is much less regulated and much more opaque. The exact terms of the loans, their price, and their ratings can be kept in the shadows and out of regulators' sight.Once a relative backwater in finance, private credit has grown into a $3 trillion industry that is increasingly intertwined with the economy. Small and midsize businesses are utilizing these loans to scale up, from manufacturing plants seeking to purchase new equipment to dental practices looking to expand. Meanwhile, private credit has become the hottest business for some of the finance industry's premier names, including Blackstone and Apollo. To proponents, like Apollo CEO Marc Rowan and Blue Owl co-CEO Mark Lipschultz, access to funding with less onerous requirements is helping American businesses thrive. To naysayers, including UBS Chairman Colm Kelleher and IMF Head Kristalina Georgieva, this explosion of less-transparent debt is unsustainable, and the dubious terms of many of these loans could lead to economic trouble.This fight has now reached a fever pitch as private credit prepares for a retail investor gold rush. There's already $80 billion in retail investor cash in private credit, but Deloitte projects that number will rise to $2.4 trillion by the start of the next decade, thanks to changing rules that will allow more everyday Americans to buy the assets. Depending on who you ask, putting private credit into regular Americans' retirement savings is the key to helping people achieve financial freedom or a recipe for disaster for the entire economy.A private credit primerAt its most basic, private credit involves pooling money from investors to then lend to businesses. To facilitate this transaction, an investment firm launches a fund and goes around to people or groups with money — pension funds, ultrawealthy individuals, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and endowments — and gives them a sense of what sort of loans they want to make. Once enough investors agree to pony up, the fund then goes out and finds businesses that need a loan. It could be for hiring employees, building a new factory, or acquiring a competitor. In an ideal world, the loan enables the company to expand operations and revenue and repay the loan plus interest, which ultimately benefits the private credit fund and its own investors as a profit.Companies like these loans because they can be more flexible than bank loans, come together much more quickly, and can be more personalized. Private credit firms and the investors in their funds prefer these loans because the returns are more lucrative than public bonds, with interest rates charged to borrowers 1.5 to 3% higher.The modern private credit industry dates back to Michael Milken and the junk bond boom of the 1980s, but it really took off in the wake of post-2008 financial crisis banking regulations. New laws such as Dodd-Frank prompted banks to move away from risky loans, allowing lenders that didn't operate as banks, including private credit funds, to fill the gap. The idea was that only sophisticated institutional investors or fabulously wealthy individuals who could afford to risk losses would have their money on the line. McKinsey researchers estimated that the industry grew tenfold from 2008 to 2023, while Morgan Stanley analysts estimated that the industry expanded from $2 trillion in 2020 to $3…

AI cybersecurity is a top concern for some execs right now.Donato Fasano/Getty ImagesBusiness leaders at the World Economic Forum highlight AI security as a top concern.Executives like Raj Sharma and Tim Walsh emphasize risks from AI agents and quantum computing.Fighting AI risk could involve more AI.I'm reporting from Davos, Switzerland, where thousands of business leaders and politicians have arrived at the World Economic Forum to shake hands, talk shop, and maybe even eke out a few ski runs.Some executives I've spoken to this week had some big concerns about AI, but none of them had anything to do with a potential bubble.Raj Sharma, EY's global managing partner of growth and innovation, said there's not enough talk about AI security — specifically, the management of AI agents and their lifecycle."It has access to your data. It has no name, so there is no identity or anything associated with that," Sharma said.Compare that to humans, where every computer system and piece of data they touch is often tracked."We have to build industrial-level security for AI agents in that particular area. To me, that's still a gap that somebody needs to work on," Sharma said. "Everybody's talking a good game. But if you look under the covers, it's still not mature.""That keeps me up at night," Sharma added.He's not alone. Tim Walsh, the CEO of KPMG US, told me the biggest issue he talks to CEOs about regularly is cyber risk, specifically related to AI.AI agents are the latest twist in executives' ongoing concerns over cybersecurity, and it's proving to be an incredibly challenging problem. Somewhat ironically, the only way to fight the threat is with … more AI.In some cases, the risk has gotten so big that it's shifting timelines on companies' AI plans."It's not that they're not moving forward, but they are taking a moment to make sure that their environment is secure, and perhaps even leaving data on-prem a little bit longer so they're confident that got their data security in place," Walsh told me.Walsh said another "real concern" is the threat of quantum computing from a security perspective.While he acknowledged we're still a few years out from the tech being fully developed, its power is incredible."Quantum breaks everything," Walsh said. "I mean, all encryption."That's led companies to look at their systems and reencrypting things, no easy task."We're spending quite a bit of time as well, helping companies think through: What does that look like? How do you structure it? How long will it take?" Walsh said.Read the original article on Business Insider

Quatrième de Ligue 1, l'OL se rend chez la lanterne rouge dimanche (17h15). Ce match face à Metz sera dirigé par Éric Wattellier. Retour des semaines à deux rencontres pour l'OL. Jeudi, direction la Suisse afin d'affronter les Young Boys en Ligue Europa (18h45). Puis, dimanche, place à la Ligue 1, avec une quatrième place […] L’article Metz - OL : avec Eric Wattellier aux commandes est apparu en premier sur Olympique & Lyonnais.