Carol, Bank Of America, Mark Jenkins discussed on Bloomberg Businessweek
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Been you've had interest rates starved investors right You've had an economy that's been reopening and credits so cheap that pretty much any company that wanted to tap the credit markets So what happens as we reopen we move along if those underlying premises that were pretty optimistic don't pan out What happens to the credit market Well here's the good thing as a credit investor which I always like to point out which is what's happened in the past 18 to 20 months is that the actual equity cushion that we have in a lot of our investments is actually wider now or thicker if you will then free pandemic So from a margin of safety perspective when you think about that yes we worry about where the economy is going to macro all those effects But we really look to what's that margin is safety today And even if things go down dramatically how much of a margin state to do we still have So when you look at debt to ebitda it's quite high from historic level People talk to but if you actually look at ebitda coverage ratios they're actually high from the historical perspective On a broad aggregate basis right It depends where you go obviously So all those things together make us feel very comfortable with the environment we're in but we're going to have to go more thoughtful with respect to the underwrites that we do Carol brought up sectors You gotta ask what sectors do you think are particularly exciting to you right now Well I think we're slightly different than on the equity side where we can drive a lot of value creation So what we look at are companies that allow that a can be part of that part of the value chain with respect to cost savings for instance So do you have a product or a service that allows you to bring the cost of what you offer down That's .1 We're not necessarily looking at companies that have this unbelievable top line growth But if it has a great that's good for us And then the difference between I think the best thing we look at is we're cash flow investors So we're looking at what are those near term cash flows Because the duration of our investments are relatively short So if you're in the tech sector where your cash flows are pushed out ten or 15 years that's probably not that attractive to us because we need cash flow for our loans but if you're in a service sector that provides something that for instance we have a company that provides software that allows you to more efficiently manage healthcare claims and then guess what That's a pretty attractive it's a small input cost for a very big problem So it sounds like it's not necessarily companies right It's those companies maybe mid tier or something that are really interesting to you guys Yeah I think if you look at private credit as a whole generally you're not dealing with what I would call the larger cap companies that you see in the leverage loan space So the banks indicate loan space I mean we do deal with those companies At times and we do have large one of the largest coal managers in the world So we do have a lot of those But I think on the private credit side more or less you're looking at middle market companies and companies that have that don't have access to the capital markets traditionally I'm wondering where you see private credit going over the next ten to 15 years If you think about where it is right now versus where you think it'll be I think private credit is like we're private equity was ten or 15 years ago I mean if you think about all of alternatives which are roughly $8 trillion 1 trillion is in private credit Do you think about all bonds and equities is about a $225 billion market So we're relatively small as a portion of the alternatives but we're even a smaller portion of the overall market itself And there's a number of drivers right now One is people are rotating from public into private for that pick up because they need that incremental yield and a low rate environment Number two is public companies there's not as many public companies as there where it's ten years ago as I'm sure you know there's actually twice as many private companies and they're staying private longer And I think the third thing is is that you've seen a retrenchment from the banks who have kind of got out of the leverage lending space mostly regulated out after the great financial crisis And then finally you got to grow the retail where retail investors are saying hey I need a diversify my portfolio So you get all that together We think there's a lot of demand factors and we see growth at ten to 15% a year How does ESG play into all of this Because I feel like that's a big factor I feel like a legitimization of ESG is really happening Yeah it is it is I mean the good thing is our investors are demanding and that's .1 If the customer demands it then you should respond to it And I think we are All of us across the industry I think for us we've decided that we wanted to permeate all of our investments as opposed to have the special impact fund And so we have a head of BSG or impact I know she's been on your shows before and she's excellent And so she's done things like in credit in particular where I said I want us to figure out how we can measure the risk of our credit portfolio from ESG perspective So we have an ESG risk assessment profile that we use and we look at all of our credits And we have a risk assessment for that going into the investment and we have a risk assessment of what our portfolio looks like which is powerful in that we just recently put a $2 billion credit facility in place from Bank of America where it is tied to those targets And so the cost of that leverage facility which benefits our investors is going down as a result of our billion measure that risk and manage that risk Such an important part of our financial markets the credit markets that was Mark Jenkins head of global credit at Carlisle group the private equity firm we know them well But it is interesting to see.