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 13,421 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 112 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
Dixon: Decentralized blockchain communities will build tomorrow's social networks
“A lot of the thesis we have with crypto blockchain is that a similar thing will happen with internet services in the same way that almost all software today is made by a group, a community of people who get together and build something. We think the same thing…”
Dixon: Bitcoin is too eccentric to scale to billions of users
“I think Bitcoin's important, but I think a little too eccentric for the billions of people kind of scale.”
Dodson: Allocators cannot fulfill fiduciary duty without bias reduction
“And that mirror is asking folks to be accountable to the optimization and fiduciary duty that they've signed up for and realize that without bias reduction, that is not being met, and there needs to be a big investment in innovation and getting these tools rig…”
Chamath: Mega-Scale Investment Firms Must Maximize Fees Over Carried Interest
“But if you really want to get to mega scale and run hundreds of billions of dollars and make it a business, you have to over-orient and over-index on fees and not really focus that much on carried interest.”
Chamath: Venture Capital Now Yields Worse Beta Than S&P 500
“That as the number of entrepreneurs have gone up, the amount of capital has gone up, and the returns have come down, where now you're signing up for 10 to 12 years of illiquidity, and a market beta that's worse than owning an S&P index fund.”
MLB contradicted its ethical stance by rushing Steve Cohen's ownership approval
“Baseball having just gotten through this huge ethical scandal. We've cleaned up the game. We've kicked Jeff Luno out for a year. We've kicked the manager out. We really care about ethics. And then they turn around and they rush through the approval process. A …”
Papic: Big Tech has likely peaked due to stroke-of-the-pen risk
“I just think that we're going to enter a period where stroke of pen risk is very high. And I don't think it's going to cause a collapse in prices, but I think this may be the apex and it's all downhill from here.”
Papic: Public market ESG is meaningless; real edge is in private markets
“Now, the problem I have, though, is that in the public markets, there's clearly this kind of rubber stamp of ESG that I think a lot of investors have already figured out is almost meaningless. Because you have these ESG indices that are like everybody but poor…”
Chabran: Carried interest is a cheap alignment option versus real sweat equity
“We all know that the alternative markets have generated this optionality, which will be by way of carried interest, incentive fees, that people would put as a The alignment of interest, I actually think, you know, it's a fairly cheap option compared to any oth…”
Wittenberg: All-white firms will not survive to 2050
“Our country is going to be more than 50% diverse in 2050. Our workforce in 20 50 will be more than 50% diverse. If you're not addressing these things today, if you're just a bunch of white men, that firm ain't gonna make it to 20 50.”
Walthour: Larry Fink's diversity pledge was PR to deflect Blueprint's lawsuit
“Larry Fink comes out with an announcement on June, 22nd, that he's going to increase his black staff by 30% over four years. I'd like to think that we had positive influence there, but I think that it really was not a heartfelt announcement. It was really desi…”
Walthour: NJ claimed investing in diverse managers breached its fiduciary duty
“They originally told us, quote unquote, it was against their fiduciary responsibility to invest with women and minority-owned firms. Their website now says women and minority-owned firms, we're open for consideration.”
Passive investor ESG proposals are mostly value-neutral or value-destructive
“And they might have 10 or 15 ideas for ESG change. And, you know, of those, call it 10 ideas. Five might be value neutral. Three might be value destructive, a waste of time or a waste of capital without return. And two might be value accretive.”
Senate Republicans are the primary carbon pricing obstacle but are shifting rapidly.
“Well, it's Republicans in the Senate, let's be perfectly honest. I think that's changing quickly, let's just put it there.”
Bob Litterman predicts the global economy faces decades of low oil prices.
“I think we're in for, you know, decades of low oil prices.”
Siegel: Modern Keynesians constantly stimulate, exhausting ammunition for real crises
“Keynesians generally don't have anything to do with the economics of Keynes. They think it's always an emergency, so they're always trying to stimulate, and then when you have a real emergency, they're out of ammunition and can't do much of anything.”
Siegel: Total global forest cover is actually increasing, not decreasing
“And the amount of forest in the world is going up, not down.”
Inker: Assuming an automatic illiquidity premium across private equity is dangerous
“This assumption that you get paid an illiquidity premium for anything that happens to be illiquid is I think dangerous. I think it is going to cause you not to be focused on the question of, all right, if I think this is about operational excellence, why do I …”
Aitken: Fixed Income ETF Liquidity Creation is Buy-Side Propaganda
“The idea that ETFs were ever a self-liquifying instrument, that is to say that ETFs create liquidity in their underlying reference securities was always just buy-side propaganda. Absolute garbage. And to see dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens Of credit an…”
Bridgewater is an elite academic department run by a cult leader
“Bridgewater is like, take MIT and Harvard's economics department and Stanford and Caltech's comp sci department and have them run by a cult leader and shift that all together, and you've got Bridgewater.”
Private credit funds offer 8x leverage covenant-lite loans to hide defaults
“And they basically start buying market share by offering the riskiest loans. So they're offering unit tranche, eight times debt to EBITDA loans with no covenants, and basically because they don't want to show their LPs that any of their loans have defaulted, T…”
25% to 30% of LBOs would go bankrupt in a normal recession
“And so much of private equity today of LBOs is single B or triple C type quality, that I would say 25 to 30% of LBOs would go bankrupt in a normal business cycle, normal recession with normal levels of delinquency.”
Private equity will likely enter an extend-and-pretend zombie state
“There's this extend and pretend zombie type behavior where the money that you put into private equity never blows up, but you never get it back, you know. And I think that's probably the most likely scenario”
US private equity multiples are distorted and significantly overpriced
“Now I think private markets are much more expensive than public markets, and you can see this with the venture-backed stuff like WeWork. Private markets say it's worth seventy-five billion. Public markets say it's worthless. You can see it in the deal multiple…”
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…”
Distressed debt returns during crises have historically been disappointing
“Distressed debt doesn't do all that well. Everybody says, oh, the thing I want to do in the next crisis is buy a lot of distressed debt. Well, we have a simple rule at Verdad on both the equity side and the credit side, which don't buy things that go bankrupt.…”
Kraus: Passive investing and high-frequency trading do not create price discovery
“Passive models do not discover prices. High frequency trading trades around prices, but it doesn't create price discovery. It creates liquidity, but it's not price discovery. It's not determining value.”
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.”
Seides: Warren Buffett lacked a robust thesis for their 2008 index bet
“So he didn't have a robust thesis. He was just plying it, you know, to hope to make the point that fees, you know, in hedge fund world are expensive.”
Lew: I only give negative feedback to high-potential people and let others fail
“And when I don't like somebody, I don't say anything. Hey, just go and fail. I don't care. It does come down to that. And because it's painful, right? It's not comfortable to give people negative feedback. So I really only do it to the people who I care about …”
McKinsey sent threatening letters to Institutional Investor and identified zero errors
“The article is called The Story McKinsey Didn't Want Written, and then we started the story by saying, during the reporting of this piece, McKinsey sent multiple threatening letters to institutional investor. We stand by this piece entirely, and they have not …”
Rattner: A company's primary fiduciary duty is to responsibly serve its shareholders
“And I'm almost with Milton Friedman, who wrote that famous New York Times Magazine piece in 1970, which said that the job of a company is to go out and make money ethically, legally, responsibly, but ultimately to serve the shareholders.”
Karp: 95% of hedge fund managers generate returns primarily from beta
“95% of managers, the bulk of their returns are some form of beta.”
Karp: Even 80th percentile hedge fund managers are doomed
“I think the averages are doomed. I think even 80th percentile is doomed. I think you have to be in the 99th percentile at this point, whereas 20 years ago you could have been in the sixtieth percentile and you were pretty good.”
Karp: 3G Capital's Kraft Heinz model has been horrific for human health
“And, you know, Kraft Heinz is the perfect example of this, is that there's been almost this three G mentality towards things that we put on and into humans. And that has been potentially for some period of time, good for shareholder value. It has been horrific…”
Fitzpatrick: PE pays advisors high fees while obscuring performance for ten years
“And if you're a financial advisor and you're recommending private equity, first of all, it's the thing you can sell where you get paid the biggest fees usually. And nobody's gonna know if you're right or wrong. For 10 years.”
Tepper: High corporate margins stem from pricing power, not efficiency
“That paper itself started tied the high profit margins to competition and pointed out that it's not because these firms are just that much better and more efficient. They're getting a higher return on assets and it comes from scale. Rather, they end up with pr…”
Tepper: Economic Inequality Stems from Lack of Competition, Not Capitalism
“What Piketty talked about certainly does happen, which is that you end up with an increase in inequality. And it doesn't come because there's a fatal flaw in capitalism. It comes because essentially there's not enough competition. Capitalism itself is not func…”
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…”
Antitrust Regulators Are Captured by Retrospective Bribes From Law Firms
“What they're ultimately doing is, it's what Nassim Taleb called the retrospective bribe, where it's not like someone's giving them a suitcase of cash, but rather they're very aware and conscious that if they're going to go back to their law firm, they want to …”
Warren Buffett Invests in Unnatural Monopolies Created by Regulatory Fiat
“Buffett tends to like what I call the unnatural monopolies, right? So he's an owner of Moody's. That only exists because it was an act of Congress which created the NRSRO designation, and it's easier to raise an armed militia in the U.S. Than it is to start a …”
Druley: Only 100 to 200 hedge funds merit institutional capital
“What I would say is hedge funds is an asset class not worth the money. That said, there's seven, 8000 hedge funds. We think there's a hundred to 200 that actually do merit institutional capital and continue to merit institutional capital.”
Novogratz: Bitcoin is finished as a project and serves as digital gold
“Bitcoin's kind of done. The project is finished. It's good enough to be decentralized gold. It doesn't have to change.”
Novogratz: Only offshore crypto exchanges with loose KYC are making real money
“The only place people are making real money is in the retail exchanges, and most of them offshore where they're taking all kinds of regulatory. They have more regulatory Movement. You know, not as tight on the KYC stuff, and so Binance, and Bitfinex, and I mea…”