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 4,524 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
Walthour: NJ Director said State Investment Council opposed minority-owned firms
“And McDonough says to me, Jake, the SIC is not a fan of investing in minority owned firms.”
Grantham: The AI bubble will break, led down by Nvidia
“This is exactly where you'd expect the bubble to break, and you would expect, other things being even, that it will be let down by NVIDIA, followed closely by the other giants.”
The private capital secondary market will reach $1 trillion by 2031
“I'm on the record for saying that the secondary market is going to get to a trillion dollars by 2031. Whenever I say that, the first reaction is, you're crazy. And I've heard that a few times, I guess, in my career. But I have a deep conviction around this pre…”
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.”
Grantham: The market bubble will likely break in weeks or months
“So I think this is an indicator, not a certainty, but a strong possibility that we are quite close to the bubble breaking in terms of psychology. Perhaps a matter of weeks or months, not years.”
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.”
Peters: Private equity is done and managers will emerge looking terrible
“This is the kind of thing that may make me look foolish. I think private equity is done. I think that it will always be an investment style like it has for over the course of my career. It was just LBO investing when I started, I guess now it's private equity,…”
Jain: Over half of hyperscaler backlog stems from OpenAI and Anthropic
“Now we're getting more clarity that more than half of the backlog, hence probably the revenue too,
Is coming from basically anthropic slash open AI.
If you look at Google and Microsoft is more than half open AI.
Amazon is more than half.
So they invest with op…”
Jain: CoreWeave and GPU cloud providers are bleeding heavily from underpricing
“When you're underpricing everything, if you look at CoreWeave and EBS, they're bleeding heavily.
That means they're not covering the cost.
The real test of shortage is when you're priced appropriately.
It's a capitalistic system, so when you subsidize somethin…”
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.”
Grantham: South Korea Will Cease Being a Viable State Within 50 Years
“That South Korea cannot be a viable political entity in as little as 4050 years. Cannot.”
Grantham: Capitalism Must Change or Humanity Ceases as Successful Species
“Capitalism will either change, or we will cease to exist as a successful species.”
Kleinman: Semi-liquid PE will fail to deliver a good client experience
“It's not going to give the client, i.e. The wealth client, a good experience in the long run.”
Wolfe: AI infrastructure buildout will destroy hundreds of billions in capital
“On the capital market side, you see hundreds of billions of dollars destroyed of people that play the same game that you did back in 2000 with fiber optic cables.”
Gave: US supply disruptions from tariffs will be as bad as COVID-19
“We saw this kind of discrepancy during COVID, and it took the economies a year to get back on their footing. This time, it's going to be just as bad. I don't see how the economy doesn't grind to a standstill. These strict discrepancies are going to be very uni…”
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.”
Gave: US-China negotiations will result in China leaving the Americas and US leaving Asia
“This, I think, will end up being the negotiations with China. China, you get out of the Americas, and we'll get out of Asia. That is a trade that Xi Jinping will be very happy to make.”
Gave: Chinese competition will eliminate profitability across the AI sector
“We also know that when China enters the room, profits walk out, so there's not going to be any profit in AI forever.”
Papic: Europe Will See a Tsunami of LNG Supply Disproving Deindustrialization
“Europe is going to be absolutely drowned in its tsunami wave of LNG supply that will crash on its shores over the next two years. This whole deindustrialization debate is wrong.”
Bessent: Marine Le Pen will become president of France in 18-24 months
“I would predict that in the next 18 or 24 months, Marine Le Pen
The bête noire of European politics is going to be president of France, and she's going to be president of France because the alternative on the left is worse than she is.”
Miller: Overcapitalized renewables will likely destroy multiples of shale capital losses
“I see renewables as just a massively overcapitalized space. It will likely torch capital on multiples of what happened to shale.”
Miller: 100% battery backup for Germany's grid would cost $270T
“And the back of the envelope math says, well, in order for Germany to be a hundred percent renewables plus a hundred percent battery, the battery piece of that equation was 270 trillion dollars.”
Miller: Coal-to-gas shift delivers 2.5x the environmental benefit of gas-to-renewables
“And when you look at the delta between, if I move from a coal plant to a natural gas plant, and a natural gas plant to a renewables plant, That first step has 2.5 times the environmental impact.”
India, not the US, will be the dominant market in the 2020s
“And I don't think the U S is going to be the dominant market in this decade. At this point, it's probably going to be India.”
Assaf: S&P 500 passive funds will likely lag good active managers over 5-10 years
“It probably won't do as well, relatively speaking, over the next five to 10 years as it did over the last five to 10 years relative to good active managers. We believe that. We'll see.”
Tepper: Replicate expensive quality funds for 15bps using XLP, XLK, and XLV
“You can basically buy XLP, XLK, and XLV at 15 bibs and replicate with about 95% correlation a lot of these quality funds.”
Sandler: Prosecutors threatened to destroy Princeton Newport unless it aided Milken prosecution
“The prosecutors at the time had told the principals and the lawyers for Princeton Newport that they're going to run over them. They're going to destroy them unless they help them against Michael Milken and another Case that was under investigation at the time,…”
Sernovitz: GP stakes funds bet on excess management fees over outperformance
“If you talk to some of the guys in the GP stakes funds, It's a bet on the excess management fees rather than outperformance.”
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.”
Seides: Buyouts underperform public equities after risk and illiquidity adjustments
“He said, in aggregate, buyout investments failed to match public market alternatives. After adjusting for the higher level of risk and the greater degree of illiquidity in buyout transactions, publicly traded equity securities gain a clear advantage.”
Seides: Aggregate venture capital returns fail to compensate for risk
“Over reasonably long periods of time, aggregate venture returns more or less match marketable equity returns, indicating the providers of capital fail to receive compensation for the substantial risk inherent in startup investing.”
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 …”
Multi-manager hedge fund platforms consume 80% of their gross alpha in fees
“The EROC is terrible. And another way to think about it is, of the total gross alpha, how much do they keep? It's about 80%. We get 20% of the alpha. The alpha's huge. Absolutely huge. But we could never get comfortable with only getting 20%.”
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.”
China Will Become Uninvestable If Xi Retains His Current Advisors
“If he stays in power, which it looks like he's going to, and he's got the same people around him, the same advisors, I think China is going to ultimately become an uninvestable market.”
Distressed Russian Assets Will Return 50x Rapidly Upon Any Regime Change
“Just a small amount of investment in those stocks, and some people can retire on it because you're going to make 50 times your money on any regime change in a very quick period of time, so.”
Argentina Might Be the World's Best Performing Market in 2023
“Next year might be the best performing market in the world on the back of that election.”
Dixon: Google and Facebook will become low-growth legacy giants like IBM
“I think they're very likely going to become like IBM and HP and just chugging along and not really doing much new innovative stuff. They'll still be around and they'll still have their services, but I think that their relevance and growth are limited.”
Dixon: a16z owns less than 5% of most Web3 networks
“Generally what we own, contrary to Jack Dorsey and others saying that we own web three, we generally own sub five percent of most of these networks.”
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.”
Layer-2 scaling systems will eventually decouple from Ethereum and become independent
“So yes, these systems are tightly coupled to Ethereum today, but once they get substantial use and substantial capital inside them and all sorts of app developers deploying straight to them, at some point they're going to say, wow, why don't we integrate to a …”