John Zito

And the idea at that point was that you had very wide spreads for investment grade credit because we were coming out of the financial crisis.

And you had access to very long duration, cheaper liabilities because interest rates had gone down a lot.

The spread business was extremely profitable.

And the asset management side of those businesses in traditional asset management for insurance had not been as sophisticated of going into other things like structured products or just other products other than the traditional QSIP liquid business.

And so the core of the business is originate excess spread, similar rating, and fund the business with super long duration liabilities.

And that there was no one really running it as a growth business.

They were running it because a lot of the public stocks traded at a discountable.

But if you look at how much equity capital has been raised in the last, since the GFC, we're over 50% of total equity capital raised in retirement insurance businesses over

And we've been the biggest beneficiary of that because we've been very active in growing both our asset side and our liability side.

When we started to realize that the business was going to scale, we had to do two things.

We knew that we were going to be short origination because how are we going to service our own balance sheet?

So from 2014 to 2022, we spent just under $10 billion of our own capital buying our own origination, PK Air, aviation finance.

We built our own

non-qualified mortgage business called NuFi.

We bought the CS warehouse business called Atlas.

We built and hired in those businesses 4,000 employees that originated assets on behalf of our balance sheet with companies that you don't know are Apollo, but they're Apollo Capital.

And with that, we never really were building that on behalf of our third-party credit business because most of that's investment-grade, tight-spread collateral.

No one would have built a business.

Rates were zero.

From the financial crisis until 22, the clear trade for anybody who was managing money was interest rates are negative or zero everywhere.