Goldman Sachs Emerges as Lead Bidder for $37 Billion Credit Firm Palmer Square

Since Palmer Square Capital Management hired advisers around September 10 to solicit buyers, according to Yahoo Finance, the sale process has narrowed fast. As of Tuesday, September 22, Goldman Sachs has emerged as the lead bidder for the $37 billion firm, according to a Bloomberg News report cited by TradingView, Newsquawk and Traders Union.

No final agreement exists. Bloomberg's sources say the talks could still fall apart. Goldman Sachs declined to comment when Bloomberg asked. Palmer Square did not respond to requests for comment, per TradingView's report.

Palmer Square, founded in 2009, is one of the largest issuers of collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs, financial instruments that bundle corporate loans into securities sold to investors. The firm is run by husband-and-wife team Chris Long and Angie Long, according to Traders Union and Yahoo Finance.

Its CLO platform alone accounts for nearly $27 billion of its $37 billion in total assets, according to S&P Global data cited by Yahoo Finance. Among its early backers was a family that once owned the world's largest Pizza Hut franchisee. The Longs have also built a public profile outside finance as co-owners of the Kansas City Current, a women's professional soccer team.

The CLO market is on a tear. According to a Dechert report cited by Yahoo Finance, U.S. CLO issuance hit roughly $103.3 billion across 236 deals in the first quarter of 2026, then jumped to $126.5 billion across 285 deals in the second quarter, putting the first half of the year near $230 billion combined. Dechert's report projects continued growth in dedicated CLO equity funds through the rest of 2026.

Other firms have moved in parallel. Traders Union notes that Franklin Templeton's Benefit Street Partners, which manages $93 billion, closed a new $500 million CLO vehicle earlier this year, and CVC Credit closed a $1 billion CLO equity fund in April. Traders Union also points to Schroders' pending £9.9 billion sale to Nuveen, a deal expected to create a combined asset manager with roughly $2.5 trillion under management, as part of the same consolidation wave hitting the investment industry.

Skeptics of Wall Street's renewed appetite for packaged corporate debt will note that CLOs and their cousins, collateralized debt obligations, played a starring role in the 2008 financial crisis. A reasonable worry is that a big bank buying deeper into leveraged loan securitization concentrates risk exposure at an institution that's also systemically important to the broader financial system.

That concern is legitimate as a matter of market structure. The factual record shows this: no regulator has raised a red flag about this specific transaction, no investigation has been opened, and CLOs are structurally different from the subprime mortgage-backed securities at the center of the 2008 crash. CLOs are built on corporate loans, not consumer mortgages, and have historically performed with far lower default rates through past credit cycles. Whether that history holds if leveraged loan issuance keeps accelerating at 2026's pace is an open question, not a settled one.

No purchase price has been disclosed in any of the reporting. It's unclear whether the deal, if finalized, would require Federal Reserve review given Goldman's status as a bank holding company acquiring a nonbank credit manager, or whether it would clear as a straightforward asset purchase. Bloomberg's sourcing indicates talks are advanced but not done. Until Goldman Sachs or Palmer Square issue an on-record statement confirming terms, the size of the check and the structure of any transaction remain unknown.