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 11 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
Credit investors never know companies as well as private equity investors
“What I learned back then, and it remains true to this day, no matter what anyone else may say to the contrary, credit investors do not know companies as well as private equity investors, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.”
Centerbridge spent years evaluating First Brands and Tricolor but passed entirely
“First Brands and Tricolor. We looked at both for years. People said there's never been a picture of Patrick James. We flew to his office. We met him in person. We had the Tricolor management team at our office. We spent a lot of time with both these businesses…”
Centerbridge sees no broad economic softness across its portfolio companies
“We have not seen softness. Any given company can go through a patch. We have some building products companies that we own. They're going through some stuff now. We haven't seen a particular sector of the economy start to keel over”
Distressed-for-control is just private equity done by de-leveraging the company
“Distress for control is just a buyout. The only difference between a distress for control transaction, buying debt, converting it to equity to own a company is that in a traditional bio you're using leverage to acquire a company. Distress for control. You're d…”
Investors rarely excel across both debt and equity without specializing
“What we learned over time, it's rare that you find someone who can hit 300 from both sides of the plate. People who are natural lefties or natural righties. So we evolved that terminology of being a switch hitter to having majors and minors.”
The influx of private wealth will commoditize alternatives and depress returns
“At some point, alternatives are no longer going to be an alternative. And they're like mainstream. And when that happens, it means it will be harder to generate outsized returns. That's what worries me. I think about that in terms of influx of wealth capital. …”
Second-guessing colleagues after an investment mistake is culturally corrosive
“When people get into the shoulda, woulda, coulda game, it drives me bananas because we all make mistakes. It's the nature of investing. If you're a professional, you don't need to be told by your coworkers, we should have done this, could have done that, it wo…”
Direct lending accounts for over half of Centerbridge Partners' opportunistic credit business
“And that was really a sea change in opportunistic credit investing to the point that it's more than half our business now as opportunistic credit investors, We're lenders and not just LMEs. In fact, LMEs are only a small portion of it”
Centerbridge professionals earn a substantial minority of compensation from other firm strategies
“We make sure that people have meaningful components of their compensation come from across the firm. You still may have a major, which is perhaps a majority of your compensation, but a substantial minority, and I mean substantial, will come from other areas in…”
Centerbridge name bridges private equity and private credit into the center
“The name center bridge, even though it sounds like just one of those other names involving a direction or a structure, there was some thought to it in that we were taking two strategies. Private equity, and now it's called private credit, but that phrase didn'…”