Borrowing by private equity firms at the fund level.
Ted Seides argues it is an end-of-cycle phenomenon.
“NAV loans strike me as a canary in the coal mine signaling the end of the private equity boom. According to Preqin, 645 firms have not raised a new vehicle since 2015. With interest rates higher and the fundraising environment tighter, credit is scarce. NAV loans feel like the “extend and pretend” activity we saw after the GFC. For every Vista NAV loan, there are probably ten used to cure the woes of a GP.”
Interview between Goldman Chair/CEO David Solomon and former CEO/Chair of Google on the future of Generative AI is worth a read.
“In general, the disruption occurs first in the industries that have the most amount of money and the least amount of regulation.”
Pairs nicely with this analysis of the latest batch of Y-combinator companies that are using AI/ML startups (139 in total!) and what areas they are working on.
“For the first time, China has overtaken the United States as the number one ranked country or territory for contributions to research articles published in the Nature Index group of high-quality natural-science journals.”
Interview with the military and grand strategy author – Edward Luttwak – thought-provoking throughout.
America’s power abroad, especially in Asia but increasingly with a resurgent Nato, is strong due to its alliances.
But this power is useless unless you have cohesion at home. There America is experiencing a cultural war.
Parallels with the Roman Empire are clear – “I think we could last another couple hundred years, but not much longer. For Rome, they had barbarian migrations and, of course, an ideological break that was fatal. Rome’s institutions were remarkable, and their concept of citizenship was something deep and profound, but the Romans were overwhelmed demographically.”
“The chart below shows the substantial amount of debt to roll over in the next 2 years with $127bn, or circa 12% of the market’s outstanding debt, being due for US HY companies. In Europe, maturity walls are even steeper, with €97bn of debt (23% of the index) maturing in 2024/2025. Add in 2026 maturities, and the refinancing wall shoots up to just to under 50% of the market. Historically speaking, this is likely to become the largest refinancing effort for HY issuers since the GFC (2008), and while some companies have already begun doing their homework, we expect it to become a key theme in 2024, particularly if base rates and borrowing costs remain elevated.”
Unlike GFC, as M&G points out, the situation is better – (1) new issuance is open (2) rates are lower despite the spike (3) quality is better.
As GMO points out – clean energy has gone through a classic hype cycle.
All the relative outperformance blow out has come off.
Yet, change could be afoot – especially as firms focus on profitability – as described in this excellent analysis from AlphaSense (need to sign up).
Government policy is helping – here is what GE said about the big incentives offered by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
“I know the IRA has created an eight year incentive, an incentive through 2030. That was enough of a long-term incentive for a few of the manufacturers that I know of that were making big decisions on supply chain changes, onshoring things, changing from China sources. In the absence of IRA incentives they would not happen. They would be small changes.“
“In this paper, we study the relationship between stock fund managers’ facial attractiveness and fund outcomes. Utilizing the state-of-art deep learning technique to quantify facial attractiveness, we find that funds with facial unattractive managers outperform funds with attractive managers by over 2% per annum. We next show that good-looking managers attract significant higher fund flow especially if the funds are available on Fintech platforms where their photos are accessible to investors. Good-looking managers also have greater chance of promotion and tend to move to small firms. The potential explanations for their underperformance include inadequate ability, insufficient effort, overconfidence and inefficient site visits.”
It is business lore now that Gillette originated the business strategy of selling cheap razor handles to lock in customers to relatively more expensive razor blades, or so the story goes, recreated in board rooms and strategy meetings around the world today.
However, as this paper shows, Gillette never actually pursued this strategy – even when patent protection meant their handles couldn’t be used with any other blade.
Fascinating history of how we all ended up doing PowerPoint slides all the time.
The creator of PowerPoint also has a colourful story – “It’s hard now to imagine deafening applause for a PowerPoint—almost as hard as it is to imagine anyone but Bob Gaskins standing at this particular lectern, ushering in the PowerPoint age. Presentations are in his blood. His father ran an A/V company, and family vacations usually included a trip to the Eastman Kodak factory. During his graduate studies at Berkeley, he tinkered with machine translation and coded computer-generated haiku. He ran away to Silicon Valley to find his fortune before he could finalize his triple PhDs in English, linguistics, and computer science, but he brought with him a deep appreciation for the humanities, staffing his team with like-minded polyglots, including a disproportionately large number of women in technical roles. Because Gaskins ensured that his offices—the only Microsoft division, at the time, in Silicon Valley—housed a museum-worthy art collection, PowerPoint’s architects spent their days among works by Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn, and Robert Motherwell.”
