Myth #9: “Without a public benchmark, private credit returns aren’t dependable” Private credit assets are illiquid, and don’t trade. That distinguishes them positively from larger, liquid, public, yet more volatile, assets correlated with market moves. Middle market loan yields are therefore more stable through business cycles. Also, being illiquid, private credit demands, and achieves, a…
We spent our winter break last week at an Arizona dude ranch. In the horse barn we spotted a sign: “There will be a $5 charge for whining.” Heading into the home stretch of our special series on private credit myths, we like the cost for complaining. For faithful readers of The Lead Left, however,…
Here are the next two fables in our continuing special series on myths of private credit: Myth #5: “No one uses mezzanine debt anymore.” As we detailed over four years ago (link), private sub debt regularly gets kicked around at conferences for being “dead.” This has particularly been the case since the advent of the…
This week in our continuing special series on the private credit myths, we come to: Myth #3: “We’re late in the cycle, so loans now are risky.” Let’s first take the issuer side of the equation. One of the virtues of private credit is being available when public markets are shut or expensive. Invariably those…
We continue our special series this week with : Myth #2: “Private credit is the next market bubble.” The same notion that private credit is crowded drives the view that strong investor demand will lead to a burst market bubble. It’s a myth that’s applied regularly to leverage loans. The universe of broadly syndicated loans…
Responding to last week’s discussion of the relationship between age and happiness [link], several readers asked what country has the happiest residents? According to the World Happiness Report [link], Finland topped the list of 156 countries. The US was 19th, and South Sudan as the least cheerful place to live. Finland is perhaps a surprising…
A Dartmouth College professor has found that middle age is even more depressing than we thought. The good news? Things start looking up pretty quickly after that. In a recently published study, David Blanchflower found unhappiness is a U-shaped curve, bottoming out when people are 47.2 years old. These results were consistent with residents in over…
Remember your summer internships in high school? Neither do we. There’s a vague recollection of delivering mail for a financial advertising agency on Wall Street. (It’s also where we first encountered the term “Lead Left,” but that’s another story). Wolf Cukier’s stint at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center last summer could have been equally tedious….
Her name was Lola. At least that’s what Danish archeologists are calling the female whose DNA was discovered in birch bark she had chewed 5,700 years ago. The sticky resin was used prehistorically to fix broken tools, for medicinal purposes, and for gum. The discovery was notable because no other remains of this ancient inhabitant…
The name George Laurer may not be familiar to our readers. But his invention certainly is. Mr. Laurer, who passed away two weeks ago at the age of 94, created the bar code. The UPC is now a universal feature of consumer products, but prior to its adoption in 1974, cashiers had to manually input…