The Who’s Who of leveraged finance showed up for the Wells Fargo Investment Thought Leadership Forum at the Plaza Hotel in NYC last week. In what has become the Davos of Credit, titans of our industry such as Howard Marks, Leon Black, and Larry Fink held forth on broad themes around what the smartest and…
Last week’s feature on Hershey PA proved to be one of our more popular commentaries. Several faithful Lead Lefters recounted their favorite childhood reminiscences of the American epicenter of all things chocolate. According to one senior banker who grew up in Hershey, Milton Hershey established the town’s K-12 school in 1909. Today the school’s endowment…
Thanksgiving weekend included this family’s first trip to Hershey, Pa. For three little girls HersheyPark and Chocolate World were candy-coated nirvana. Life doesn’t get sweeter than designing your own chocolate bar. Sprinkles? Butterscotch chips? Yum. For adult vacationers the story of Milton Hershey’s entrepreneurial journey was educational. His formal schooling ended in fourth grade. Two…
In what was the highest price ever paid for a painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold last week for $450.3 million at a Christie’s auction, beating by a wide margin the $179 million forked over two years ago for Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger.” The price tag also topped the entire building cost of New…
Besides the Annual LSTA Conference, the other recent industry gathering of note was the Creditflux CLO Conference in NY. The focus here was trends in structured finance, from both issuer and investor perspectives. Collateral loan obligations, as we’ve covered in a special series [link], represent the majority of loan buyers in the broadly syndicated market….
The backdrop for US credit got a boost from several corners last week. First, the nomination of Jerome Powell to be the next Fed chief ensured monetary policy would be, if not unchanged, at least in experienced hands. Also, the October labor report – 261,000 new jobs added– came in pretty much where economists expected….
The French are running out of butter. C’est impossible! Bad weather, falling milk production, and revived global demand for the dairy product have left bare shelves in France, particularly Brittany. This in a nation where consumers eat three times as much butter annually (18 lbs. per capita) as in the US. L’affaire du beurre (a.k.a….
Blame it on the Vikings. When those ancient Scandinavians settled Iceland around 870 AD, they cut down most of the trees for firewood and to clear land for planting and livestock. A thousand years later that country of volcanos and glaciers is struggling to reforest. Despite planting three million trees across a land mass the…
The notion that covenant-lite loans are bestowed on only the best and brightest borrowers has been pretty banged up. Cov-lite and other leveraged lending terms are now hostages in the front-line battle middle market arrangers are waging for business. Competition is no longer just among the midcap lender themselves. For companies in and around the…
News reached us last week that the great mathematician, Monty Hall, passed away at the age of 96. Better known as the host of the 1960’s TV hit, “Let’s Make a Deal,” Mr. Hall lent his name to game theory for the so-called 3-Door Monty Hall Problem. Behind three doors there’s a brand new car,…