The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 27 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Sternlicht: Lordstown Motors committed fraud and lied about vehicle orders
“They front run the trade. They lied about their orders. They made up the car. It was a fraud. The model they showed the street was not active.”
Fisher (2020): At 5% interest rates, every real estate investor goes bankrupt
“No, not a chance. They go to five to six percent. Every real estate investor that we know is bankrupt. They're not hanging on. They're broke and dead. And every home builder in America has no customers. That's a fact.”
Grantham: US housing never bubbled nationwide until Greenspan and Bernanke
“The American housing market had famously bubbled in Chicago and bust in California, bubbled in Florida, etc. Never altogether until Greenspan and Bernanke.”
Papic: Trump will likely moderate tariffs to 5-10% rather than 40%
“I think the response is going to be President Trump saying, I was actually going for five to 10% across the board of tariffs, not 40%. Once the market sniffs that out, I think it's very dangerous to be overly bearish on risk assets.”
Kuruvilla: Philip Morris rates higher in ESG databases than lung cancer drugmakers
“So we have often marveled that Philip Morris, which is a widely known provisioner of cigarettes and tobacco, rates more highly on many of these databases than on companies that are actually trying to treat lung cancer.”
The average private equity firm created zero real value over a decade
“The average private equity firm over the last 10 years earned 15% net. Seven and a half percent of that was from multiple expansion, which is basically referencing the public equity markets, multiples, and those companies get valued in line with those, and so …”
Ballou: Carlyle Escaped ManorCare Wrongful Death Suit Through Fund Shell Structure
“When the family of that resident sued for wrongful death, Carlisle was able to get the case against it dismissed, saying that it was not the technical owner of the nursing home chain, but rather merely advised a series of funds whose limited partners through s…”
Ballou: Blackstone recouped Apria Healthcare DOJ settlement costs via dividend recaps
“One of the examples that I was looking at was Blackstone's acquisition of Apria Healthcare, which ultimately had to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department because of allegedly selling medical devices that were never actually us…”
Ballou: PE-Owned Companies Are 10x More Likely to Go Bankrupt
“That also is borne out at least in some of the sort of quantitative studies, suggesting, for instance, that private equity-owned portfolio companies are 10 times as likely to go bankrupt as non-private equity-owned peers.”
Ballou: Sun Capital Used Section 363 Sale to Offload Friendly's Pensions
“When Sun Capital bought Friendly's, the diner chain in the Northeast, they did a lot of the tactics that we were talking about, push the company into bankruptcy, but they were not just the largest equity owner in the company, they're also the largest lender. A…”
Ballou: PE insurance failures leave state guaranty funds holding the bag
“The challenge that we've got is if these insurance companies fail, the responsibility for paying the continuing obligations will essentially default to the state guarantee corporations in which the insurance companies are incorporated. So if you have an Iowa i…”
Mullen: Institutional rentals invest billions annually in new home construction
“We're putting billions every year into building new houses that during a cycle like this wouldn't take place.”
Giannini: A Broad Distressed Debt Cycle Will Not Materialize
“There's not going to be a distress cycle. Sorry, there'll be some distress deals that are interesting, I'm sure, but you sort of had this period where, oh my gosh, things are going bad, let's raise a distress debt fund, and they still are trying, but just tell…”
Geremia: ESG will cease to be an investment term within three years
“The most exciting to me is that ESG will go away. It will not be an investment term in three years, and it has nothing to do with it not being super important.”
Dixon: Web3 payouts will pass Web2 payouts in next couple years
“I believe we'll see in the next couple of years, web three payouts past web two payouts.”
Sternlicht: Amazon subsidizes $4B-$5B retail losses with AWS to destroy small retailers
“It's fundamentally destroying mom and dad retail across the country, and it's one of my pet peeves because they were allowed to sell product retail-wise for less than the cost of, they're losing four or five billion a year in retail, which they subsidize with …”
Sternlicht: Marriott lobbied Washington to outlaw Starwood's paired-share REIT structure
“Bill Marriott had been at this for
40 years, and I've been at it for three.
He decided that this enough is enough, and they're gonna get rid of our paired share structure.
So he went to Washington, and in the budget reconciliation bill of that year, they threw…”
Ford: San Francisco lost 100,000 residents due to progressive policies
“I'll probably get in trouble for this, but San Francisco has moved so far to the progressive end. They've lost a 100,000 residents out of 900,000 people.”
Siegel: Total global forest cover is actually increasing, not decreasing
“And the amount of forest in the world is going up, not down.”
CEO pedigree and elite education do not predict stock returns
“Turns out that going to business school empirically does not mean that your stock price does better. Turns out working at an investment bank or top tier consulting firm has no impact on the stock price of the company that you run. Turns out that your track rec…”
Kraus: Hedge funds generated no alpha in short positions over the last decade
“In general, across the industry, for long periods of time, last 10 years, there is no alpha in the short positions.”
U.S. Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim Was Once Google's Lobbyist
“Macon Dalrahim, for example, is the attorney general for antitrust in the US. He was Google's lobbyist for the double click acquisition.”
TransDigm Hikes Acquired Aircraft Component Prices by 500% to 700%
“A classic one that hedge funds love and that I think is horrific is Transtime. Basically, there's not competition because to get an FAA part approved takes a very long time, and so you and I can go and provide seat belts cheaper than Transtime, and anytime the…”
Walden: A large portion of proof-of-work mining energy comes from renewables
“I'm not, you know, defending this practice, but I'm just noting that a lot of these emissions are either sort of latent or a large part of the energy mix of proof of work mining is from renewables.”