The Carlyle Group Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Carlyle Group second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference has been recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Daniel Harris, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Shannon. Good morning and welcome to Carlyle's second quarter 2026 earnings call. With me on the call this morning is our chief executive officer, Harvey Schwartz, and our chief financial officer, Justin Plouffe. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release and a detailed earnings presentation, which is available on our investor relations website. This call is being webcast and a replay will be available. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures during today's call. These measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for measures prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. We have provided reconciliation of these measures to GAAP in our earnings release to the extent reasonably available. Any forward-looking statements made today do not guarantee future performance and undue reliance should not be placed on them. These statements are based on current management expectations and involve inherent risks and uncertainties including those identified in the risk factor section of our annual report on Form 10-K that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated. Carlisle assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements at any time. In order to ensure participation by everyone on the line today, please limit yourself to one question and return to the queue for any additional follow-ups. With that, let me turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Harvey Schwartz.

Thanks, Dan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We delivered an outstanding second quarter with record results across our diversified global platform. Our momentum is the result of disciplined execution, focusing on investment performance, and delivering on our strategic plan. Highlights in the quarter include our highest level of distributed earnings in nearly four years at $472 million, which includes record distributed earnings in both Carlisle Alpinvest and Global Credit. Record FRE of $358 million, up 11% year-over-year, driven by record fee-related performed revenue and record capital markets fees. Net realized performance revenues increased more than five-fold from last quarter, and another strong quarter of inflows with nearly $17 billion. Our fundraising momentum is exceptional, with $56 billion of inflows over the last 12 months, a 10% increase from the prior year. All of this drove AUM to a record $485 billion. As we enter our fundraising super cycle, we've already attracted $30 billion of organic inflows in the first half of 2026, another firm record. In Carlisle Alpinvest, our strong start to the year continued with another 5 billion of inflows in the second quarter, including a final close of our single asset secondary strategy, capital for our portfolio finance strategy, and continued growth in our evergreen wealth solutions. In global private equity, this quarter was exceptionally busy. We raised an anchor commitment of $5 billion towards the first close of our U.S. buyout fund, and we've officially launched marketing for this strategy. We launched a dedicated defense and industrials platform and announced its first transaction, the acquisition of Syctorian Systems, an NSA-certified hardware data encryption provider. I'll give you more detail in a moment, but we also continue to be an industry leader in realizations. And in global credit, we attracted $6 billion of inflows with solid activity in structured credit, asset-backed finance, and flow reinsurance. Looking forward, we expect to have nearly all of our core strategies in the market raising capital over the next few years. This will support accelerating revenue and earnings across our platform, underpinning our conviction in our three-year strategic plan. Let me pivot to realizations. As I mentioned, Carlyle remains an industry leader and an outperformer in returning capital to our clients. We returned nearly $7 billion to our clients this quarter and $37 billion over the past year. Second quarter realizations were strong and diversified across asset classes and geographies. These include realizations in U.S. and Japan buyout, Financial Services, Real Estate, Opportunistic Credit, and Aviation, among others. In our largest private equity strategy, US Buyout, we've returned 23% of its fair value to investors over the last 12 months. I want to underscore that this is more than twice the current industry average, and also more than the long-term average for capital return of 20% for the industry. Lastly, Our global forward pipeline is similarly strong, with several announced transactions already closed in July or expected to close over the next few quarters. Shifting to deployment, we invested $14 billion this quarter, including several significant transactions in corporate private equity. Cervantes, the coatings business carved out from BASF, MAI Capital, an RIA and wealth management firm, and Tsukiko, a Japanese construction company. Those transactions and the capital raised for U.S. buyout helped generate record U.S. capital market fees of more than $100 million. This is a direct result of repositioning the capital markets business three years ago to capture a higher level of transaction fees across the platform. Again, these fees are high quality and very low risk earnings. In wealth and retirement, we continue to see strong momentum across the platform and are generating strong net inflows led by Carlyle Alpinvest. We generated over $7 billion in gross sales across evergreen wealth over the past year, driving AUM in these strategies to a record $20 billion. That's up more than 60% year over year. I'll now finish with a few thoughts on the macro backdrop. The market and U.S. economy continue to display a remarkable degree of resilience in the face of the war in the Middle East. Significant pressure on energy markets, stubborn inflation, and increasing public market volatility related to questions around AI. When we look at our proprietary data, largely KPIs rolled up each month across our nearly 300 portfolio companies, we see a U.S. economy that continues to expand at an annual rate of 2% to 2.5% in real terms, with 6% annual growth in corporate revenues. While there are some pockets of stress from the Hormuz-related price shock, U.S. consumption continues to grow at an impressive rate overall. Outside of the U.S., the positive effects of the AI CapEx boom are visible across Asia, and reality seems better than market perceptions in Europe. The energy impact is real, but so too are the defense and infrastructure-related industrial orders, which made a meaningful contribution to growth in recent months. All these near-term market dynamics continue to support the longer-term considerations that drive the need for capital investment around the world. National security issues including defense spending, energy security, data security, and an urgent focus on economic growth across the industrials and healthcare sectors are driving a demand for durable capital across the globe. This longer-term macro landscape maps directly to where Carlyle is positioned to lead and deliver. As you firmly said before, the demand for private capital continues to grow and is growing in areas where Carlyle has built deep sector expertise for decades. With that, let me turn the call over to Justin.