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 1,728 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
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…”
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-…”
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: 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: 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 …”
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: 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.”
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…”
Direct lending returns will likely fall 200 basis points as banks re-enter
“As that market continues to evolve, and as the banks start to get back into some of these areas, we do think returns are going to come down. Probably by about 200 basis points on average.”
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: 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.”
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.”
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: 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.”
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…”