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 4,533 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
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 …”
Lenders See No Pricing Delta Between $50M and $250M EBITDA Borrowers
“We actually don't see any delta in pricing or terms for the most part between a fifty million EBITDA company and a two hundred and fifty million dollar EBITDA company. Leverage levels are about the same. Pricing's about the same.”
New Liquidity Gives Capital Providers Power to Dictate Restructuring Terms
“And the only thing that's going to solve the lack of cashflow servicing a lot of debt is new liquidity. And if you have liquidity and you can drive terms on Outcomes. I think you're going to be pretty impactful. And if you don't have liquidity, I don't think y…”
Klarman: AI and Automated Trading Will Not Make Markets Fully Efficient
“And I actually am pretty optimistic that they will remain Even if computers were replacing people as money managers, and we're doing all the trading, and that's because the nature of what causes the inefficiency, it's human, but I think the computers will mimi…”
Aitken: Fed must be more hawkish than ever to tame inflation
“The pass-through effect this time, if the Fed's going to succeed in bringing inflation down back to target levels, it's going to have to be more persistent and more hawkish, I would argue, than any of us have experienced.”
Aitken: IRA multiplier will drive US capex for years regardless of 2024 election
“And there is no overstating the profound impact of this Inflation Reduction Act. It is just starting to be felt. It seems every marginal dollar of Western capex coming into the United States, because the tax subsidies are so generous, Not to mention all the sk…”
Aitken: Fed will probably hike rates higher than expected in 2023
“So successful has this bailout been so generous That they're probably going to end up taking the Fed funds rate to a level that none of them actually imagined when they started 2023.”
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…”
Aitken: Systematic inflows into liquid stocks will unwind violently
“There's more and more money coming in as volatility comes down into the most liquid stocks. But then at some point, that's all going to turn around. We don't know when. But boy, oh boy, that's going to be a lively couple of days when that happens.”
Aitken: Unprofitable companies unable to refinance face a brutal period ahead
“First and foremost, those are the ones that are going to struggle. It's those profitless companies, no matter what their line of business. And then they've been unable to refinance to this point. Boy, oh boy, it's going to be a brutal period ahead.”
Collins: US banking system won't recover until Fed cuts rates 400 bps
“Nothing's going to change until the Fed cuts rates, 400 basis points.”
Mullen: TPG-Angelo Gordon deal marks the start of a massive M&A wave
“I think you're going to see what Angelo Gordon did with TPG is the beginning of a massive wave of this. There's a lot of mergers that are going to take place.”
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: AI has turned nuclear fusion progress into a vertical curve
“AI and machine learning had so greatly accelerated progress in fusion that it was geometric now. It was a vertical curve. Because experiments used to take one to two years to run one experiment in a fusion reactor. Now they could run in high fidelity in the co…”
Sacca: Lowercarbon's Fund 7.81 will remove 7.81 gigatons of carbon
“We call that one 7.81 because we believe with that fund, we'll be able to pull 7.81 gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere. And when we do so, we will reduce the parts per million in the atmosphere by one.”
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…”
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.”
Bergstrom: Multiple Well-Regarded Multi-Strategy Platform Funds Have Gone to Zero
“In my career, a bunch of extremely well-regarded multi-strategy managers that look like platforms roughly went to zero.”
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.”
Blitz: Recent flood of private illiquid managers will fail to meet expectations
“Many managers have come out recently to meet this demand, and we just don't think the results collectively are going to be what people want, but they might not really care because the people in the seats making those decisions might change by the time the poor…”
Lasry: Federal Reserve focus will shift from inflation to recession
“I will guarantee you the focus of the Fed is not inflation, but is the recession.”
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.”
Wong: Doubling drug approvals to 80 will drive massive biotech value creation
“On average, we've been approving forty-ish drugs a year, and if 40 goes to 80, even if you're losing some on pricing, it should be a tremendous amount of value creation.”
Giannini: A Large Number of Venture-Backed Companies Will Fail
“I think certainly on the venture side, there's no doubt that you're going to see a lot of venture companies just hit the wall.”
Giannini: Recent PE Vintages Will Deliver Lower IRRs and Disappointing Returns
“We will have elongated hold periods, which means IRRs are coming down. Now, presumably the public market returns are also coming down from what they were the last five, 10 years. But I think people need to recognize that. I know general partners in particular …”
Giannini: Global Tech Leaders Will Split Into Regional Entities Like Apple
“If you wanted to make money in smartphones, 20 years ago, whenever it was, you invested in Apple, and you had a global industry leader. That's not going to happen anymore. You will have Apple US, Apple China”
Toomey: Private Equity Could Expand Two to Three Times and Stay Healthy
“I think this industry could be two, three times the size than it is today, and still be healthy and functioning and lots of flows of capital.”
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.”
Rodman: Uranium market will stay in structural deficit for many years
“The market, which will, in our opinion, remain in structural deficit for many years, regardless of capital.”
Rodman: There Has Never Been a Stored Nuclear Waste Accident in History
“There has never been an accident with nuclear waste in the history.”
Environmental commodity markets will face shortages and price inflections by mid-2020s
“And in the window of time we're in now, sort of mid decade, 20 twenties, we are likely to be flipping into an environment where we're going to be in shortage of many of these instruments. And that's likely to cause a significant price inflection.”
Orum: Tesla accelerated legacy automakers' EV plans by 10 to 20 years
“And then on top of that, there is what Tesla did in the OEM industry overall, which is it effectively brought forward The plans of all the other large automakers by likely 10 or 20 years.”
Steyer: The US is not going to adopt single-payer healthcare
“The key issue in this primary campaign seems to be whether we're going to have single payer healthcare, which anyone with a brain in their head knows we're not going to have single payer healthcare.”
Steyer: Every company, even ExxonMobil, will eventually become a climate company
“Every company, Exxon, is going to be a climate company. No question about it.”
Steyer: Siting and construction delays mean nuclear fusion won't impact until 2040
“And I think people feel as if they can break through on the engineering in the next 10 years, then that would have real impact, because then you have to site, build, plants. That takes a really long time. I'm sure there'd be a lot of pressure to do it faster. …”
Kayden: VC managers will face significant LP turnover after the boom
“You're going to see a lot of turnover in the LP base for managers broadly, as people see who really performed well, and what was a very promiscuous environment, and those people who stayed at the party too long”
Douvos: Core and opportunity fund conflicts will anger LPs during downturns
“What we saw in 2002 1001, 2002 is all of a sudden you find these companies that have like these distressed fundraisers and you actually find the same fund owning two different securities, which may be in conflict with each other. And maybe one fund has capital…”
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.…”
Kayden: A leading endowment put 75% of VC allocation into three managers
“I was talking to a leading endowment yesterday that said that 75% of their venture allocation was to three managers. That's a problem. Well, it's to three managers, each of whom has eight underlying products, and I can tell you, Mathematically, that not all of…”
Ivascyn: Green transition and geopolitics will drive structural inflation and desynchronized growth
“In the last few years, we've talked about a world where There's going to be less synchronized growth cycles where inflation is going to be more of a challenge going forward, perhaps structurally because of some of the physical investment necessary, particularl…”
Ivascyn: PIMCO expects US core inflation in high 2% range by year-end
“In the spread sectors, our base case economic view is reasonably constructive. U.S. Inflation heading back down to the high two level on the core side at the end of the year. Based on recent constructive economic data, slow growth, basically a fifty-fifty chan…”
Ivascyn: Fed rates at 5% will trigger massive loan downgrades
“If we see even moderate declines in EBITDA over the course of the next few quarters with the fed at five percent and gosh, six percent would be a real challenge. We think a massive amount of that opportunity set is going to be open and subject to potential dow…”
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…”
Thomas: Black business owners average one-seventh the equity of white peers
“African American business owners have on average about one seventh of the equity in their businesses of their white male counterparts.”
Scaramucci bets firm and personal assets that crypto pays off by 2028
“If I stay invested and my long-term thesis is correct, my clients are going to be unbelievably well-rewarded, and this is probably a really good time to buy. I'm willing to bet, obviously, the firm and my personal assets that five years from now, we're going t…”