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 2,384 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
Bitar: U.S. restrictions on Venezuelan oil push exports to China
“In the last month or two, there's been a shift in that, more towards restriction of the sale of Venezuelan oil to the U.S., In practice, what it's doing is pushing it to China, which is odd, because that would seem counter to the U.S. Objectives.”
Forman: Stablecoins Settled $27 Trillion in 2024, Double Visa's Annual Volume
“If you look at stablecoins today, they're a two hundred and thirty billion dollar market. Those two hundred and thirty billion dollars rotate on chain to the tune of about 27 trillion dollars last year in 2024, which was greater than Visa's total settlement vo…”
Gave: Private Equity and Credit Report 50% Gains Amid Flat Broader Markets
“Over that same three-year period, against loans and equity markets that are flat to down, the private equity and the private credit managers are nominally up 50%.”
Gave: China and Europe expand fiscal stimulus as US consolidates
“Now the U.S. Is doing fiscal consolidation just as China and Europe step on the fiscal accelerator.”
Gave: Non-US growth will outperform US growth as the dollar weakens
“I think we're living through the end of the year of US exceptionalism. After a 15 year standing run, the US dollar is now rolled over. I think most people's portfolio is on position for a world of weaker dollar, and one where growth outside of the US is going …”
Papic: US stock market probably bottomed at 4800
“That's why I think we probably reached the bottom at 4800.”
Unconstrained mean-variance optimization pushes institutional portfolios entirely into private assets
“And anytime you use the mean variance optimization model, unconstrained, it pushes you entirely into privates, because that's the historical return profile.”
McLean: Natural gas emissions reductions beat solar and wind combined by 2x
“When you account for natural gas emissions, the total emissions reduction that has been allowed by the increase of natural gas Because of shale development is two X that of solar and wind.”
Michalik: Health systems, not PE, lead provider consolidation
“If you just take providers over the last three or four years, there's been a rapid consolidation of Primary care, as well as specially providers of health care services, and it's been done by private equity, but it wasn't led by private equity. People forget t…”
Briner: North Carolina's state pension ranks 50th out of 50 in performance
“We are 50th best performing out of 50, and so there's a lot of desire to help fix that and move it up the curve that is really appealing to certain people.”
Miller: 80% of Republicans Under 35 Prioritize Climate as Top-Five Policy Issue
“Currently, Republicans under the age of 35, 80% of them say climate should be in our top five list of policy issues.”
Eichhorn: PE-backed insurers use much more private credit and offshore reinsurance
“Clearly there is a very, very different model for the private equity backed insurers. A lot of insurers are using private credit to be sure, but the private equity backed are using it much more and other products, whether it be CLOs and using a lot of offshore…”
Eichhorn: PE-backed insurers trade at much higher funding note spreads
“Many insurers issue what are called funding agreement-backed notes. Those are policy-level notes. They're parapesu with policyholders, so they're a really great market measure of what's the risk of an insurer, and you just see it in that data. The private equi…”
PE exits average a 28% valuation pop over prior carrying value
“What we did was we went back to 2005 to 20 22, and we looked at over a thousand companies, and we asked ourselves, when a private equity company exit, what does it exit at relative to what it was carried at two quarters prior? And the answer is, it pops 28%. S…”
Tannenbaum: 80% of new power generating capacity in India is renewable
“In reality, 80% of new generating capacity in India is renewable.”
Tannenbaum: Indian private markets returned 35 cents per dollar since 2000
“Of every dollar invested since 2000, something like 35 cents has come back, and I'm sure the industry will come good, but as I was sort of looking over the proverbial wall at other asset classes, it's not exactly apples to apples comparison, but for example, i…”
Tannenbaum: Net Foreign Allocator Flows to India Are Functionally Zero
“Net flows from foreign allocators are functionally zero to India.”
Morehead: Venture capital industry in total has never lost money over 10-year period
“The industry in total over a 10 year period, I don't think has ever lost money. I'm not sure if I'm a hundred percent correct on it, but as close.”
Dixon: No top App Store apps were created in the last decade
“Go look at the top apps in the app store. And none of those services were created in the last 10 years.”
Sandler: Judge assessed market damage from Michael Milken's violations at zero
“Interesting enough, when the judge assessed the economic damage to the marketplace from everything Michael pled to, included on the three counts that related to Bosque, that the total economic effect of these violations was zero. Not one penny was lost.”
Sandler: Milken's sentencing judge told parole commission no further wrongdoing was proven
“The judge who sentenced Mike, who held the Fatico hearing, wrote a letter to the parole commission on Mike's behalf, indicating that she held the Fatico hearing, and she did not believe that any further wrongdoing other than what he pled to could be shown, eve…”
Sandler: Milken pled to violations never previously criminally prosecuted
“We actually found things to plead to, none of which had ever been subject to criminal prosecution before, many of which hadn't probably even been enforced as regulatory violations before, but we found things that he could admit to.”
Sandler: Drexel collapsed after funding unsold inventory with commercial paper
“What had happened is, to prove they could still get deals done, they were taking a lot of securities that they couldn't sell into inventory, and they were financing it by issuing commercial paper in the commercial paper market. So in financial parlance, they w…”
Sandler: Milken received a 10-year sentence via consecutive two-year terms
“And she gave him a ten-year sentence, which number one, negated what we thought was a cap of five years. Because she gave him two years on five counts to Z serve consecutively, not concurrently.”
Sandler: Michael Milken did not go to prison for insider trading or bond fraud
“And then as time passed, and some of the same lies kept getting repeated, you went to jail for insider trading, or you went to jail for fraud in the bond, none of which is true.”
Milken: Historical bond data showed credit risk premiums exceeded actual default risk
“What everyone said about credit was wrong, and there was a book by Bradford Hittman on long-term Corporate bond and investor experience, and the riskiest credits were perceived as the best, and the best credits were perceived as the worst. Whether you were the…”
Milken: Non-investment grade debt has outperformed higher-rated debt and equities
“Going back particularly to the work that I had done in the sixties, so we're 60 years later now, the rates of return have been significant and have exceeded higher rate of debt and often equity rates of return.”
Milken: 77% of US AI PhD Students Are Foreign-Born
“50% of every software engineer or scientist in Silicon Valley in the last 30 or 40 years was not born in the United States.
60% of many of our medical research not born in the United States.
77% of everyone in PhD programs in AI not born in the United States.”
Mauboussin: Magnificent Seven Economic Profit Exceeds Market Cap Share
“When you take a look at the economic profit, so return on capital, less cost capital spread times invested capital, the economic profit Of the Magnificent Seven, it's actually larger than their market cap representation.”
Heitzmann: Thousands of startups needing capital will fail by late 2024
“There's thousands of companies that are going to need capital between now and the end of 24. The investors at almost every stage have generally been hurt by the macroeconomic environment. The purse strings are pretty tight. But the amount of companies that may…”
Ou: Top-quartile sub-$1B buyout funds outperform top-quartile mega-funds
“The medium return of funds, let's say it's sub one billion is quite similar to the medium returns of funds, five billion above observable from the industry data, but the top 10, 20% performers in the sub one billion category generates meaningfully higher retur…”
Jackson: Multi-strategy pod shop investors keep only ~45% of gross returns
“We've seen the pass-through cost structure eat away at investor returns, so now I think on average the end investor is keeping around maybe 45% of the gross return”
Fleetcor's European EV charging business has better economics than fuel cards
“We can look at their business in Europe and we can see clearly that the economics on that are actually on par, in fact, better than their core combustible business.”
Ballou: PE Firms Are Typically Insulated from Portfolio Company Liabilities
“And then the third, and this is the part that interests me the most as a lawyer, is that private equity firms Typically are able to insulate themselves from liability. So if something goes wrong at a portfolio company, the private equity firm is rarely held le…”
Ballou: PE lobbying stalled and weakened surprise medical billing reform
“There's also a thousand smaller stories, for instance, lobbying around surprise medical billing, which was really crucial to some of the business models of the few private equity portfolio companies. They were successful installing legislation for a number of …”
Aitken: Investors will absorb all US Treasury bond issuance through 2025
“Who's going to buy all these bonds that the United States is selling in 2023, 20 24, 2025 with a rising budget deficit before the recession comes?
And my answer is everybody.
Everybody.
You give people the right incentive, the right coupon, they will buy it.”
Aitken: Fundamental investors account for only 5-10% of listed turnover
“And yet the facts are that if you and I, Ted, decide we're going to buy some listed asset today, well, we're going to be five to 10% of the turnover. Because the way the world works today is that the flow is dominated by the machines, and that's not a criticis…”
Sacca: GPT-5 will train in 2023 and be 6-8x better than GPT-4
“GPT five will be trained this year, and it'll be six to eight times better than four, maybe, maybe more.”
Sacca: Google's $6B spectrum bid established net neutrality rules for wireless networks
“We went from zero to within a year bidding six billion dollars on spectrum and attaching openness rules to wireless spectrum. That's why the wireless networks are net neutral. It was because of this big hand of poker we'd played.”
Sacca: Lowercarbon's Swedish electric airplane startup has billions in orders
“We have an electric airplane company in Sweden that even Bill Gates said was going to be impossible. It's a 35 seat plane that's got billions of dollars of cash on the barrel orders. And the majors have invested in the company because it's just cheaper to oper…”
Bergstrom: Open-ended credit hedge funds are in secular decline
“The open-ended credit hedge fund businesses we believe in, in secular decline, not going away this month or this year. But shrinking significantly in favor of closed-end structures, a big long-term part of that is hurdle rates, as you mentioned.”
Monk: Sustainability and ESG factors correlate with faster portfolio recoveries
“So what we're learning, and the findings are still being developed on our team, is that it's these sustainability factors, these long-term factors, employee satisfaction, environmental footprint, things like that, that you would say, well, really good ESG tool…”
Sack: Middle-market private equity has never acquired businesses primarily with debt
“Private equity firms acquire businesses mostly using debt. Show me one of those. I would love some of that. That's never been the way it is in middle market private equity. Certainly not the way it is now.”
Rodman: There Has Never Been a Stored Nuclear Waste Accident in History
“There has never been an accident with nuclear waste in the history.”
Rodman: Rosatom's Exclusion From the West Will Create a Massive Fuel Deficit
“They're close to 50% of the market, and over time, they'll be cut out of western markets, in our opinion, which will create a very big deficit.”
Kayden: Later-stage venture is most vulnerable to market correction
“We don't tend to like larger funds, and we don't like later stage investing, largely because we think that is an area that is sort of more correlated to the public markets, you know, and an arbitrage opportunity, and so at a period of Massive, great inflation.…”
Chelsea FC's forced auction excluded a significant portion of natural buyers
“The economic sanctions that the UK and the European India put off certain individuals directly led to one of those individuals, former owner Chelsea, having to put the team up for sale. So, situationally, for us, Chelsea was essentially a forced auction by a f…”