Why Private Credit Got Entangled With Insurance
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Traci Allaway.
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Joe, there's a key tenet of finance and investing. And I think it's like essentially the thing that makes finance and investing work.
Go on.
It is the idea that you can invest in pretty much anything. The world's most stupid thing. I don't care. Dogecoin, whatever. But the key thing is, if you do that and the investment doesn't work out and it goes belly up, you should bear that loss.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I would actually- Ideally, by the way, you invest in something that doesn't have negative externalities for other people, but let's just focus on the loss portion for a second.
Yeah, I like this framing. I think you could say that financial structures overall, whether we're talking about a bank whether we're talking about a multi-strategy, multi-platform hedge fund, whether we're talking about whatever, is an exercise in trying to establish this purpose, right? Because everyone wants to make the investment that they don't bear the loss in, right? And we should all, to some extent, we should all be striving for that constantly. You want to build up these things that more or less create that to happen, principal-agent alignment problems and so forth.
Right. And so when you get moments in financial history where losses are not purely borne by investors, people often get very upset. And as you know, 2008 was one of those moments, right? One of the reasons the 2008 financial crisis was such a huge deal was because we had banks who made a bunch of risky investments and ended up getting effectively bailed out by taxpayers, even though taxpayers arguably were not the ones deciding to invest in synthetic CDOs and things like that.
Totally. Even in the absence of bailouts, this always bothers people. When someone makes money on a risk and then someone else holds the bag from the bailout example to people who promoted SPACs and made a lot of money just on the transaction but didn't participate in the downside, it upsets people. Right. And so all across finance, you see in situations where people are upset when it turns out that the person doesn't have the requisite, quote, skin in the game, unquote.
No one wants to be an unwilling bag holder. That sounds bad.
But I want everyone else to be. Like, we strive.
OK. OK, but wait. The reason I bring up 2008 is because it's actually a very important component of this conversation because we're going to be talking about private credit. And private credit, to a large extent, has grown into this massive industry. And the reason it's grown so much, one of the reasons, is because after 2008, after the banks went belly up and had to be bailed out, etc., you had policymakers make an active decision saying that they wanted to move risk out of the regulated banking system into investment vehicles where, if things went wrong, the investment vehicles themselves would bear the losses without having those losses socialized through deposit insurance or taxpayer-funded bailouts.
And all of that. And that's what basically happened, right?
Yeah, I would say there are sort of in the financial system, we have sort of, I would say, two types of creditors. Like we're cool with like people losing their money when they give money to an institution, they take a risk. But I think there's essentially two types of entities for which we don't find that to be fully acceptable. We don't find it to be fully acceptable when someone deposits their money in a bank and we, you know, we could say this is a loan.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–10:20
2
How did the private credit boom emerge after the 2008 financial crisis?
10:20–40:26
3
Why are private equity firms attracted to owning or affiliating with insurers?
40:26–46:44
4
How do insurers and private credit funds structurally benefit from each other?
46:44–52:12
Speakers
5 identifiedMore from Odd Lots
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