Josh Friedman
Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Canyon Partners. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderexecutiveWikipedia ↗
Josh Friedman co-founded Canyon Partners in 1990, building it into an alternative asset management firm focused on credit and distressed debt. Earlier in his career, he worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and headed capital markets for high yield at Drexel Burnham Lambert.
1shows
1appearances
30statements
6resolved
3supported
2contradicted
50%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Josh Friedman said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Friedman: Private credit makes the financial system safer than before 2008
“The nice thing in the private markets right now is you don't have as many critical players in terms of being in a position To take down the economy or threaten the liquidity of the whole financial system. As long as the banks are forced into a more conservativ…”
Friedman: Intra-tier creditor conflict is unethical compared to inter-tier disputes
“They don't rank high on the ethics scale, in my view, and some of that creditor on creditor violence that you get, particularly if it's from people who are in the same asset class as you. It's one thing to fight against people who they own the subordinated, yo…”
Friedman: The US will avoid a deep recession despite persistent inflation
“I do think the inflation is going to be a little more persistent, but I'm not one who believes that we're going to have a gigantic and deep recession when you're starting with 3.6% unemployment and healthy consumer balance sheets.”
Friedman: Public versus private structure barely affects true credit market liquidity
“It will never be perfect in these markets. Whether they are technically public or technically private doesn't seem to matter that much.”
Friedman: The Federal Reserve will over-tighten rates to restore damaged credibility
“And the Fed has to show its seriousness after losing some credibility last time, so they'll probably raise rates even if they don't really need to.”
Friedman: Institutional allocators copy foolish market trends due to peer benchmarking
“Sometimes they get a little too caught up in the competition of what everyone else is doing because they all get benchmarked and paid based on how everybody else is doing in the industry. So if everybody's doing goofy things, they might just do the same goofy …”
Friedman: Institutional boards should provide governance, not act as investment committees
“I tend to prefer boards that work as boards as opposed to boards that work as investment committees. If you have a great team of people and they do their work, there are parameters so that the board or the, quote, investment committee is informed, they rarely …”
Friedman: Drexel and Milken Created the Original New-Issue High-Yield Bond Market
“There was no such thing as a new issue high yield bond before Mike and Drexel. The only high yield bonds were fallen angels, investment grade bonds that had been downgraded.”
Friedman: Drexel's 1980s high-yield market fueled massive private equity expansion
“The first three years that I was there, from 1984 to 1987, were a period of exponential growth, exponential creativity. Explosion in the size of the market that we were creating and the characteristics of it, and explosion in the private equity market because …”
Friedman: Hedge fund structure beats daily liquidity mutual funds in credit
“We knew that the hedge fund structure was much better than a daily liquidity mutual fund, given the lack of liquidity in the markets from time to time, and particularly at that moment.”
Friedman: Oaktree Outpaced Early Canyon by Targeting Institutional Asset Allocation Boxes
“I remember when our good friends, Bruce Karsh and Howard Marks left Trust Company in the West to start Oak Tree and almost instantly had more capital than we did, or at least as much, and we had started a few years earlier, and part of it was that they underst…”
Friedman: Handicapping investment odds is easier in corporate than sovereign debt
“It's a lot easier to do that in corporate settings where you understand the rules of play than it is in sovereign settings.”
Friedman: Transparency gives LPs a reason to stay during underperformance
“And I also think that no investor will always do a great job at every point in every cycle. So you may as well give people a second reason to stick with you if you happen to do a poor job on the investing side, and I think having good transparency and complian…”
Friedman: Credit firms must compensate their analysts for not investing
“You have to reward people for not investing, as well as for investing, because there's a time when their areas are not particularly attractive, and you don't want to push people to invest, so you want them to own a piece of the overall firm carry, if you will,…”
Friedman: Private high-yield issuance surpassed public high-yield around 2019
“Two or three years ago was the first year that the high yield market privately issued high yield exceeded publicly issued high yield.”
Friedman: Dry credit liquidity creates huge profit for market makers
“If there's no liquidity, there's usually a lot of profit in making liquidity.”
Friedman: Distressed investing is value creation rather than a zero-sum game
“I don't necessarily see it as a zero sum game at all. I look at it as us and our colleagues against the house, if you want to think of it that way. And sometimes there's an equity holder who's trying to steal stuff that should belong to the creditors at this p…”
Josh Friedman: Bankruptcy restructurings reliably trigger aggressive, desperate behavior among participants
“There's usually a reason why a bankruptcy occurred, and someone's going to win and someone's going to lose, and you can expect a certain amount of caged animal behavior from the participants.”
Friedman: Corporate distress is delayed by low coupons and cov-lite debt
“I would expect there will be some distress, but I think it's going to take a little while before that develops because a lot of the paper that's been issued doesn't have covenants or has very, very light covenants, and coupons are really low.”
Josh Friedman: Global energy depletion is roughly 10% per year without new supply
“Depletion is Something like 10% a year, and there's no new supply, and demand keeps coming from different parts of the world.”
Friedman: New CIOs must accept high early turnover to reshape their teams
“The first thing they need to do is create their own organization in their own image so they can achieve what their goals are. They were hired to achieve their goals. They weren't hired to work with a team that's already doing everything that needs to be done. …”
Friedman: Distressed debt capital flows are almost always counter-cyclical to opportunity
“It drives me crazy, but I find that capital flows in our business are almost always counter-cyclical from what they should be.”
Friedman: Top distressed investments get paid for solving problems, not taking risk
“Those are always good because you get paid not for taking risk, but for solving a problem.”
Friedman: 1990s bond prices collapsed despite an expanding US economy
“The prices get absurdly low on pretty good credits, and it's also a time when the US economy was recovering from a recession in the late eighties, so you had an economy pointed up and bond prices going down, and it made no sense.”
The other half of the tape: Josh Friedman's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 1John Barber 1
Every mention by year
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Capital Allocators 2
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Josh's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Canyon Partners | 1 | 30 | 50% 3/6 | full record on Capital Allocators → |