John Zito

But investing in businesses and optimizing for ROE, you can if you're running a business and you understand all the different flexibility points at different parts of the capital structure on balance sheet and off balance sheet.

you're going to optimize and have better shareholder returns over time because you're going to give yourself a lot more flexibility and in some cases have much cheaper growth capital than you think you probably do than just raising equity.

If you understand credit and you're an equity investor, typically you understand all the option value you are long when you issue debt and...

You just create lots of optionality for yourself that maybe if you didn't understand that you wouldn't price it in to your stock.

Number one, have very clear credit box, very clear rules of the road on what you buy and what you don't buy.

When you're not clear on that, it can create lots of issues.

And so the more clear you can be up front,

If you're clear with someone about what you're willing to buy and what you're not willing to buy, what are the parameters and bookends of what you're willing to buy and not buy, that empowers your origination machine.

If you're not clear, if you're not clear on your decision-making, if there's not a clear point of accountability, it creates way too much noise in the channel because you're not delivering to the clients because they think they can do X. And that actually is brand degrading.

So the number one rule is make sure you spend all the time in the world to define the credit box and

And be very quick.

If you don't want to do stuff, be quick to redefine that credit box and be clear with your communication to anyone who's originating on your behalf.

That's the rule number one.

It sounds pretty simple, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to execute at scale.

So CS was going through some changes and then ultimately bought by UBS.

Atlas was the...

structured products business at Credit Suisse.

It was the number one profit center for a decade, generating a big percentage of CS's earnings for a long time with effectively no losses.

They had a $45 billion balance sheet.

And what they do is they provide warehouses to originators all over the world.