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
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
Sternlicht: Amazon subsidizes $4B-$5B retail losses with AWS to destroy small retailers
“It's fundamentally destroying mom and dad retail across the country, and it's one of my pet peeves because they were allowed to sell product retail-wise for less than the cost of, they're losing four or five billion a year in retail, which they subsidize with …”
Sternlicht: Marriott lobbied Washington to outlaw Starwood's paired-share REIT structure
“Bill Marriott had been at this for
40 years, and I've been at it for three.
He decided that this enough is enough, and they're gonna get rid of our paired share structure.
So he went to Washington, and in the budget reconciliation bill of that year, they threw…”
Elliott secured Caesars bankruptcy date agreement to trigger CDS payout
“And he had been running very tough negotiation with Apollo and struck a very, very tough deal because he knew that Apollo needed an ally really badly. And so he got all sorts of goodies, including a convertible preferred security, as well as one of these well-…”
Ford: San Francisco lost 100,000 residents due to progressive policies
“I'll probably get in trouble for this, but San Francisco has moved so far to the progressive end. They've lost a 100,000 residents out of 900,000 people.”
Siegel: Total global forest cover is actually increasing, not decreasing
“And the amount of forest in the world is going up, not down.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Csicsko: Public equities have vastly outperformed broad private markets recently
“You pair that with a public market that's vastly outperformed, the broad private market measured on, say, a Cambridge index level, and it's causing most people I know to have very difficult conversations around what is the future path of private allocation in …”
Jain: Nvidia invested in over 50 of its own customers recently
“NVIDIA invests in over 50 plus of their customers in the last six, nine months.”
Jain: Altria outperformed Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon over the past five years
“Cigarette volume has been declining at seven, eight percent in US. And guess what, last five years? Altria has outperformed Mera. I think now Microsoft and Amazon last five years.”
Jain: SpaceX generates $18B in revenue but loses $5B
“SpaceX is wonderful, but eighteen billion revenue and five billion loss.”
Public BDCs show massive valuation discrepancies on identical syndicated club loans
“There's some obvious ones where you see, let's just say public BDCs that own the same club deal, the same loan. One BDC versus another, or two or three versus a fourth BDC, there's a massive variance, in a second lien especially, where you're like, wait, the f…”
Certain private credit loans drop from par to zero in one quarter
“Then you have micro situations where loans are getting marked from hundred to zero in one quarter.”
Grantham: Every Two-Sigma Asset Bubble Historically Reverted to Pre-Bubble Trends
“In major countries, there was no exception to the principle that an overpriced market at two sigma, which is just a statistical measure. If you look at the price, you look at the breakout on the upside. If it's two sigma, there is no exception to the rule that…”
Grantham: AI CapEx is larger than any peacetime program in history
“AI Moving at warp speed, involving a greater CapEx program than has ever happened before outside of war.”
Grantham: Greenspan, Summers, and Levitt Blocked CFTC Subprime Regulation
“Greenspan and Summers and Levitt of the SEC waged war against the CFTC doing its job of regulating subprime instruments. They each, in turn, called up Brooksley Bourne, who was the boss, a lady of iron nerve and principle. They harangued her, saying, what are …”
Executive Hires Placed by VCs Have an Average Tenure Under 18 Months
“You look at the data of executive hires placed by a venture firm. Either an investor said, like, oh, you got to hire this guy. He's going to come in and totally change your go-to-market. This guy's going to blow revenue out of the water. Or it's through a tale…”
Grefenstette: 80% of founders pitching a16z use cheap open-source Chinese LLMs
“I think Andreessen came out recently and said, 80% of the founders that come to them are using open source Chinese LLMs, because it might be 70, 80% as effective, efficient, but it's a 10th the cost.”
Kleinman: AI CapEx represents at least 2% of GDP growth
“That's representing at least a couple percent of GDP growth right now. That's driving massive investment in infrastructure and chip manufacturing and energy and all of these things.”
Kleinman: Mutual Funds and ETFs Will Blend Private Assets into Products
“Traditional asset managers, i.e. Mutual funds, ETFs, they're gonna start injecting some amount of private assets blended into their products.”
Monk: UC Investments' Jagdeep Bachher Is Attempting to Buy College Leagues
“Our friend Jag Deep is trying to buy college leagues.”
Over 80% of Capital Group equity strategies beat their benchmarks post-fees
“If you look at our equity strategies since inception, over 80% of them have beaten the market after fees.”
Sacerdote: Inference-time reasoning will be adopted by all AI models
“And now deep seek is basically solidifying this inference time reasoning is going to be adopted by all the models.”
McGurk: Israel Eliminated All Iranian Air Defenses in October Counterstrike
“The Israelis responded by taking out all of Iran's air defenses last October, which set the stage to what happened this past June.”
Broyer: Austin, Dallas, and Tampa have not led long-term rent growth
“If you step back and look at the data, you look at over the past 10 years, 20 years, it's not the Austins, the Dallases, the Tampas of the country that are performing the best Because we're solving for rent growth.”
Lyon: Private equity falsely held 2022 valuations flat despite public market plunges
“If you looked at 2022, the S&P was down 20%. The NASDAQ was down 30%. Let's say private equity lives somewhere between those two worlds. Private equity was flat for the year.”
Seides: Major private equity platforms will acquire deal teams within five years
“I'd be very surprised if you don't see one of the larger private equity players try to grow through acquiring teams. They are long capital and short origination or dealmaking capability relative to the capital they could command. So it does make sense that if …”
Sullivan: Buyout firms routinely overpaid at 20-plus times EBITDA during COVID
“Buyout firms routinely paying 20 plus times EBITDA for quality businesses, but businesses that probably should not trade at that high valuation. Doing that in a world where interest rates were zero, and there was a lot of money being pumped into the economy by…”
CAA secured private school admissions for clients' children through agency donations
“One of the things we pioneered at CA was We literally service the clients on everything. They wanted to buy a house. We helped them. They wanted to buy a car. We knew all the dealers. They wanted to get their kids into private schools. We had contributed to th…”