(Substack)—Private equity has weathered a tough stretch, with dealmaking grinding to a halt amid high interest rates and economic uncertainty. Yet even as exits remain elusive and global buyout activity dipped in the second quarter of 2025, major players in the industry are pouring resources into building their teams—especially in areas like fundraising, investor relations, and marketing. This push reflects a calculated bet on brighter days ahead, as firms position themselves to capitalize on the nearly $1.2 trillion in dry powder sitting idle, waiting for the right opportunities.
The hiring surge picked up steam in the first half of 2025, according to recruitment firm Magellan Advisory Partners. While buyout deal values in April fell 24% below the first-quarter average and deal counts dropped 22%, thanks in part to tariff-related jitters, private equity leaders aren’t sitting still. Instead, they’re aggressively raiding Wall Street for fresh talent, interviewing even first-year analysts for starts as far out as 2026.
“While deal flow is cyclical, the need to secure capital is permanent — firms are investing ahead of the curve,” explains Sasha Jensen, founder and CEO of executive search firm Jensen Partners. Jensen’s point drives home how these investments in people aren’t reactive but proactive, ensuring that when markets thaw, these firms have the firepower to attract investors and close funds swiftly.
This focus on fundraising expertise makes sense in a landscape where limited partners are holding back liquidity. Jensen adds that “fundraising distribution teams are ‘central to survival’ in the current constrained, limited partner liquidity environment.”
Elaborating on this, she notes the high stakes: without strong teams to pitch to institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals, even the biggest funds risk stalling out. Christopher Connors, a principal at Connors Consulting Partners, echoes this urgency, stating that “firms are happy over-paying for fundraising talent.” For Connors, the math checks out—”It can be a large expense to the firm, but relative to how much revenue these people could bring in, it’s a good deed to the firm”—turning what might seem like a costly bet into a revenue engine that pays dividends down the line.
The talent grab extends far beyond U.S. borders, with firms chasing growth in emerging markets. Apollo Global Management is bolstering its presence in Japan and across Asia, while Warburg Pincus and Carlyle Group are ramping up hires there too. New outposts are sprouting in Singapore and Mumbai, and North American recruitment has already outpaced levels from mid-2022 and 2023. Chris Eldridge, CEO of North America, Ireland, and U.K. recruitment at Robert Walters, observes that “international expansion is a common thread, with firms in the U.S. expanding into Asia and vice versa.
Similarly, U.K. private equity firms often first target the U.S. before moving to Asia.” This pattern underscores a strategic pivot: as domestic deals dry up, global diversification becomes essential, drawing skilled professionals to fuel operations in high-potential regions like Southeast Asia and India. Europe’s scene is perking up as well, buoyed by the Bank of England’s five rate cuts since last August, which could unlock more activity on that front.
Wall Street banks, long a prime hunting ground for private equity, are pushing back hard against the poaching. Goldman Sachs now demands that junior bankers certify every three months that they haven’t lined up jobs elsewhere, a direct response to the allure of buyout firms. JPMorgan Chase is taking even tougher steps, threatening to fire incoming analysts who accept future-dated offers within their first 18 months or skip training sessions for interviews.
CEO Jamie Dimon has called such behavior “unethical,” highlighting the friction as banks shorten promotion tracks to two and a half years to keep talent in-house. Private equity’s counter? Building their own training programs, as Jensen points out: “Banks like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are tightening mobility, and [private equity firms] are responding by building in-house training programs.”
Not every firm can play this game at the same level. Connors points out a clear divide: “I think there’s a clear bifurcation between the largest firms [that are multi-strategy], and have economies of scale that can afford to hire.” The giants, flush with scale and undeployed capital exceeding $1 trillion in equity strategies alone, hold the advantage, per PitchBook data. A key draw for these recruits is carried interest, the performance-based pay unique to private markets.
As Connors describes it, “It’s a significant economic vehicle that lures talent to the space. It’s an economic vehicle that just doesn’t exist in the investment banking world, and it doesn’t exist in traditional asset management. It’s unique to the private markets industry.”
Fundraising itself remains a slog, with no buyout funds topping $5 billion in the first quarter—the first such quarter in a decade—and over 18,000 funds chasing $3.3 trillion from investors, creating intense competition for every dollar. Still, this talent offensive signals resilience. With exits lagging and dry powder piling up—now at levels unseen in years—private equity is laying the groundwork for a rebound that could reshape industries once policy clarity returns and rates continue to ease. In an era of economic headwinds, these moves show how private capital stays agile, ready to drive growth when the moment arrives.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
