John Zito

I think I go back to the beginning of my career when loans were not even going to be something that traded and all of a sudden they were all on bank balance sheets and people thought it was just complete lunacy that you would trade a loan.

And today you're issuing 500 billion of CLOs today.

I worked my first job out of college.

I sat on a trading desk.

And the guy next to me was launching a $5 million credit hedge fund.

And I used to get in early.

I didn't even know what a bond was.

And I would read up and down.

I was reverse commuting to Greenwich.

And I was learning the difference between bid, ask, yield, how to calculate bond yield, all on my own.

I went to Amherst College.

And it wasn't really a finance-heavy education.

It was much more about thinking outside the box and being much more liberal arts education.

All learned on the job.

And he ended up hiring me as his second employee to start this hedge fund.

And in 2002, 2003, he ended up raising a billion four.

Guy name was Jim Casper, who had run Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter's high yield business for a long time and J.H.

Whitney's high yield business for a long time.

But a billion four was massive in credit, just massive.

The whole ecosystem of alternatives and going into institutional products.