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Bernie Sanders has spent his political career touting a populist platform that decries any form of perceived Wall Street greed. The latest example came this week when the Democratic presidential hopeful visited Philadelphia to protest the planned closure of Hahnemann University Hospital, which offers a range of medical services for the city's poorest residents, Pitchbook.com reported. Speaking to about 1,500 hospital workers and other supporters, Sanders criticized Los Angeles-based investor Joel Freedman and his private equity firm, Paladin Healthcare. In 2017, Paladin and its portfolio company, American Academic Health System, bought the hospital and St. Christopher's Hospital for Children from Tenet Healthcare for a reported $170 million. MidCap Financial, the financing arm of Apollo Global Management, served as the lender, per reports. 

Deutsche Bank AG unveiled a radical overhaul that will see the lender exit its equities business, post a 2.8 billion-euro ($3.1 billion) second-quarter loss and cut the workforce by a fifth to reverse a slide in profitability, Bloomberg News reported. Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing will shelve the dividend this year and next and take restructuring charges of 7.4 billion euros through 2022 to pay for an overhaul that shrinks the German lender’s once-mighty investment bank along with its global footprint and key fixed-income business. The scale of the revamp underscores the failure of Sewing and his recent predecessors to solve the fundamental problem: costs were too high and revenue too low. After government-brokered merger talks with Commerzbank AG collapsed in April, the CEO had few alternatives to bolster market confidence. His plan was approved by the board at a meeting yesterday.

Deutsche Bank AG and its co-lenders were staring at tens of millions of dollars in potential losses. The banks had promised to arrange loans to fund Apollo Global Management LLC’s buyout of discount grocer Smart & Final Stores Inc., which the private-equity firm planned to split in two, Bloomberg News reported. But worried about razor-thin margins and intense competition in the industry, many investors had shown little appetite in recent weeks for the riskiest part of the deal — a $380 million tranche tied to the company’s retail side. If the lenders couldn’t drum up interest, they’d be left on the hook for the financing. Smelling blood in the water, some funds began pitching deeply discounted offers. The banks’ confidence was wavering. Then, a huge order came in. It was from Apollo itself. In a rare move, the firm offered to buy about $100 million of the loan. While the lenders weren’t out of the woods yet, it spared them from having to swallow bigger losses.

The Federal Reserve is scheduled to release results of annual stress tests for big banks in two parts, one today, and the other on Thursday, June 27. The firms could have an easier time with the exams because the Fed for this year overhauled several components, including a test of how firms would fare under a hypothetical doomsday scenario, the Wall Street Journal reported. Each year, banks subject their balance sheets to doomsday scenarios envisioned by the Fed. This year, the central bank’s “severely adverse” scenario would see unemployment rising by more than 6 percentage points to 10 percent, with U.S. stocks declining by 50 percent and major stresses in the corporate lending and real-estate markets. After the Fed publishes the scenarios, banks run their own tests, which helps them determine how much capital they can return to shareholders while still remaining sufficiently capitalized under the hypothetical crisis. Eighteen banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will take the stress tests this year, compared with 35 last year. The Fed allowed firms with assets generally between $100 billion and $250 billion to skip this year’s tests under a new biennial schedule for those firms.

Blackstone Group LP is in the final stretch of raising what would be the largest private-equity fund ever. Big funds, however, don’t necessarily translate into big returns, according to a Wall Street Journal commentary. The private-equity giant has capped its latest fund at around $25 billion amid strong demand. Collecting that would take the fund past the $24.6 billion record set by Apollo Global Management LLC in 2017. Others also are raising big funds: Advent International said earlier this month that it had raised a $17.5 billion fund, and software-focused Vista Equity Partners is raising a $16 billion vehicle. The rise of megafunds reflects the growing demand for private equity from large investors such as sovereign-wealth funds with hundreds of millions of dollars to put to work, according to the commentary. With interest rates still persistently low, the industry’s historical reputation for 20 percent-plus returns, is appealing — even if it means paying higher fees and having money locked up for long periods. The problem is that the largest funds haven’t always lived up to the hype. Taken together, private-equity funds of $10 billion or more posted 14.4 percent five-year annualized returns net of fees as of the end of last September, barely edging past the 14.1 percent return for the S&P 500, according to data from investment firm Cambridge Associates.