Blackstone turns sluggish credit business into a winner

- Investment firm uses low-fee formula to attract individual investors to credit funds in push to gather $1 trillion of assets
Blackstone Inc. towers over most of its private-equity peers with $731 billion in assets, but the firm has had a soft underbelly for years: its sluggish lending business. Now, credit has become one of the firm’s fastest-growing segments, part of a broad shift under the leadership of President Jonathan Gray.