Coleman Church

What was that like?

I never worked in Ukraine.

I've been to Ukraine on investor trip.

I have traded Ukraine debt.

I traded emerging markets debt my whole life until May of this year.

I traded and sold it at a bunch of different banks, London and New York.

Ukraine was certainly one of the...

One of the insurance we traded, traded through the Russia crisis.

So emerging markets debt, originally the asset class grew out of the debt crisis in the 1980s when money center banks were hung with primarily Latin America debt after the crisis.

uh after the 80s crisis um nicholas brady treasury secretary at the time came up with a plan called the brady plan to restructure the debt back it with collateral u.s treasury strips that would make it more palatable to a broader base of investors to get it off the balance sheets of the money center banks

It's one way to put it.

It's a way to clean the balance sheet up and to create, I think there are two impacts.

One, you clean up the bank's balance sheets, get it off their sheet and create a marketplace and a dynamic balance.

that allows liquidity for this debt and then creates a whole new marketplace and ability to issue and clean up the country's balance.

So you're doing good for the banks and you're doing good for the countries and theoretically doing good for a whole new investor base.

And that started in the early 90s and I kind of walked into Wall Street in the early 90s out of college and I just fell into this market that was starting and really boomed for a while.

Treasury strips is your coupon bonds, effectively.

So you have risk-free collateral that's attached to the bonds.

So to get investors who are obviously wary of sub-investment grade emerging market, at that time it was called less developed countries, LDC, then it evolved into emerging markets debt, which actually...

is sort of a misnomer at this point because it characterizes almost everything outside of G7 from single A debt to defaulted debt.