Robert Armstrong

Blue Owl is a large... What would I call them?

Fixed income investor.

So they run assorted funds that manage...

credit investments on behalf of investors in various different ways.

And they're a big player in the space.

They've been around for a long time and they've made a lot of money.

So they're a meaningful player, especially in private credit, which is, of course, kind of the asset du jour of the last couple of years.

It used to not be.

And it's not so often that a new asset class kind of appears, right?

The last, you know, private credit is now something that an institution say is

you know, a respectable institution will have a private credit allocation in their portfolio.

And that might not have been true three or four or five years ago.

And, you know, you have to go back 30 years before that when kind of junk bonds became like this new asset class that people were getting into.

And I think the magic of the asset class has two parts.

One is that

It is reputed to have fixed income, like returns, like the returns you might get from, uh, high yield bonds, but with a little bump, because you are lending to a special class of borrowers.

The, these funds are lending to borrowers who for one reason or another would like to avoid public markets.

either they want a bilateral relationship with their lender or their business is such that it's hard for larger markets to understand, or their cash flows are uneven, or for whatever reason, they don't want to be buffeted by the daily grind of the high yield bond market.

So they do a bilateral deal with a lender who charges them a little bit more.

So let's say you are getting 8% on your