Andrew Milgram

Yeah, so it's a notion we talk a lot about with investors and with the companies that we invest in.

Everybody in the U.S.

economy, at least, has this underlying sense that there are some parts of our economy that are doing exceptionally well.

But at the same time, they have this internal notion that there are other parts that are just worse than it seems, that there's a nagging slowness or a nagging underperformance to the economy in broad areas.

They can't quite put their finger on it because they look at CNBC and Bloomberg and they read the Wall Street Journal and there's green arrows in the ticker tape economy.

Those companies and

those wealthy individuals who have access to capital, who have access to resources, and can drive unbelievable profits and great outcomes.

But there's a broad part of the economy, and I think we see this in the political sector being expressed pretty acutely, the broad pieces of the economy that are just dissatisfied with their earnings power, with their ability to benefit from the promise of the American economic system.

that discrepancy i think is really hard for people to understand but when we say k-shaped economy it immediately resonates with people because they see it themselves they feel it in real time they understand intuitively that there are those who are having fabulous success but they also understand that there are people and companies that are just not getting their piece of the pie there's this amazing data set that you've just spent time exploring i want you to explain the data set and then all the findings

Well, I'll start with at MarbleGate, we focus on the middle market.

And the reason we focus on the middle market is, A, it's one-third of U.S.

economy.

And by the way, over time, it has represented something north of two-thirds of all restructurings, bankruptcies, etc.

So it's the area of the most, let's say, action.

It's also the area of the economy people know the least amount about.

The companies there don't file publicly their financial statements.

They typically aren't listed on stock exchanges.

So the only people who really have an insight into how the middle market is doing.

are individual lenders to it, to individual companies or individual owners of individual companies.

And so a lot of the talk about the middle market tends to be anecdotal.