Andrew Milgram

For the ticker tape economy, the tariffs are not going to be terrible.

In fact, they could be constructive.

For the middle market, though, anything above a 5% or 6% tariff

will have a devastating impact on margin and consequently on the ability to service their debt stock.

So any persistency to tariffs will crush the U.S.

So MarbleGate started in 2008, 2009.

2008, my business partner, Paul Arroway, called me up.

He was at Bear Stearns.

I was at another distressed investing firm called Epic Asset Management.

And he said, look, all great distressed investment firms are born out of crises, and this one's ours.

We sat down and talked about how would we go about building an investment firm and how would we go about accessing investment opportunities in the distressed market?

Now, Paul and I had done a lot of business together over the years, and we liked focusing on the same types of businesses.

We saw this middle market area as being wildly underinvested.

As we grew up in the business, and I oftentimes refer to Paul and I as the youngest of the old group of distressed investors, what we saw were the oak trees and the Apollos and those folks who had cut their teeth investing in distress getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And a lot of that mimicked or mirrored the growth in the LBO market.

We oftentimes refer to the LBO business or the private equity business as our manufacturing division because they will produce a certain amount of problems pretty consistently.

So as the LBOs got bigger, a lot of the investors who had been built to invest in their problems similarly got bigger.

But that left an entire portion of the market just under-invested, under-prosecuted, under-looked at, under-analyzed.

And we saw it as pretty rich pickings.

So when we set around to build MarbleGate, we said, look, we're going to focus on that middle market.