Timothy Johnson, global head of Blackstone Real Estate Debt Strategies
Blackstone
When banks tightened their lending standards after the 2008 financial crisis, Blackstone stepped in, providing debt to institutional investors and real-estate developers who found it difficult to get financing otherwise.
“Generally speaking, our place in the world of real-estate finance has been filling in the gaps of what a traditional bank would do,” Johnson, the global head of BREDS, told Insider in 2020.
Blackstone played a similarly vital role when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
While traditional lenders pulled back because of economic uncertainty, the company raised $8