Page: Early bank creditors were oblivious to emerging secondary debt markets
Marcia Page · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · Dec 11, 2023 · at 17:33
Marcia Page, Co-Founder of Värde Partners, reflects on the early days of distressed debt investing and trading defaulted bank debt in the late 1980s.
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“I distinctly remember trading bank debt in a company called Revco, which is a defaulted drugstore chain. Bought it at about 50 cents on the dollar, went to a bank debt meeting, I believe it was in L.A., Everybody at that table was, why is this person here from Minneapolis, and what's a hedge fund doing in our room? When I told them that we had bought it in the secondary market at 50 cents on the dollar, you could literally hear a pin drop. The market didn't even have an appreciation that there was a secondary market developing in assets like bank debt”
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