The CapEx Nobody Budgets

Ask a middle-market CFO how the company finances equipment and the answer is clear. Ask how it finances a new product line, an ERP replacement, a compute and network overhaul, or a conversion from diesel to electric process heat, and the answer gets vaguer. In most cases the honest answer is: out of operating cash, […]

The Rounding Error

On September 16, the Federal Open Market Committee raised the federal funds target range by 25 basis points to 3.75% to 4.00%, its first increase since 2023. The vote was unanimous. The more consequential signal came in the projections: 16 of 18 participants expect at least one more hike this year, and four see two. […]

Data Centers Are Coal’s Biggest New Customer. Nobody Will Say It Out Loud.

Two facts, both from the federal government, both published this year. First: after fifteen years of flat electricity demand, the Energy Information Administration now projects U.S. generation growing 25% to 50% through 2050, with installed capacity rising as much as 90%, a transformation the agency attributes overwhelmingly to data center construction. Second: in 2025, the […]

America Runs on Rebuilt Equipment. Wall Street Still Prices It Like Scrap.

Walk any serious industrial site in America and you will find the same machine twice. On the books, it is a fourteen-year-old asset, depreciated to a rounding error, carried at a value that would embarrass a used car lot. In the pit, or on the floor, or on the ramp, it is something else entirely: […]

Nobody Believes a Coal Retirement Date Anymore. That’s a Finance Problem.

At the start of 2025, the owners of America’s coal fleet told federal regulators they would retire 8.5 gigawatts of generating capacity by year end. They retired 2.6, the smallest annual total since 2010. Plants with published shutdown dates kept running under Department of Energy emergency orders. Two plants cancelled retirement entirely. Operators of capacity […]

New Research Finds the Private Equity Exit Window Did Not Open — but the Portfolio Aged Anyway, and Deferred Operational Capital Is Why Some Assets Will Not Clear When It Does

First National Capital Corporation mid-year analysis finds distributions have held below 15 percent of net asset value for a record fourth consecutive year, and argues sponsors treating the extended hold as an operating mandate — not a waiting room — will exit first and at better multiples First National Capital Corporation, one of the largest […]

The Covenant You Accepted in 2021 Gets Negotiated by Your Buyer in 2029

Structural concessions are made when the exit feels theoretical. At a seven-year hold, it stops being theoretical rather sooner than anyone planned. Financing decisions at portfolio companies are made under a particular kind of time distortion. The transaction in front of you is immediate and concrete. The exit is a slide in a fund model. […]

The Asset You Are Waiting to Sell Is Getting Harder to Sell

Extending a hold assumes the value is static. In equipment-intensive businesses, it never was. The logic of waiting out a bad exit market is straightforward enough. Multiples are compressed, buyers are cautious, the bid-ask spread is too wide, and taking a process to market now means accepting a price that does not reflect what the […]

Every Automation Project You Deferred Funded an Add-On. That Was a Choice.

When operational capital and acquisition capital draw on the same facility, the allocation meeting has already been decided before anyone walks in. Ask an operating partner whether they have systematically underinvested in their portfolio companies’ equipment base and you will get an immediate and sincere no. Ask them to name the last three capital allocation […]

New Research Finds Business Aircraft Buyers Who Waited for a Softer Market Got a Tighter One — and Were Out-Processed, Not Outbid

IRVINE, Calif. — August 19, 2026 — First National Capital Corporation, one of the largest independent providers of capital equipment and project financing in North America, today released Nothing Good Stays Listed, a mid-year research report examining how the business aviation market rewarded buyers who could execute through the first half of 2026 — and […]