Alan Waxman - Private Credit and the Modern Financial System - [Invest Like the Best, EP.466]
My guest today is Alan Waxman, co-founder and CEO of Sixth Street, a $130B global investment firm. Private credit is one of the most discussed topics in markets right now, and there is a lot to make sense of. The current discourse is almost entirely focused on symptoms. Alan Waxman has spent the time diagnosing the root cause. Alan thinks about the financial system the way a historian would, studying the incentives, guardrails, and market structure that determine how things play out. In this conversation, he traces the evolution of American finance from the 1929 crash through Glass-Steagall, the GFC, and Basel III to explain how we arrived at what he calls the factory model, the industrialization of liability-gathering and asset deployment that he believes is the root cause of everything happening in private markets today. This is my second conversation with Alan, our first one is one of my favorites from last year. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp’s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. ----- This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Trusted by thousands of businesses, Vanta continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Visit vanta.com/invest. ----- This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. WorkOS is a developer platform that enables SaaS companies to quickly add enterprise features to their applications. Visit WorkOS.com to transform your application into an enterprise-ready solution in minutes, not months. ----- Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit ridgelineapps.com. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Timestamps (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best (00:02:43) Intro: Alan Waxman (00:04:35) Financial System Guardrails & Incentives (00:05:56) System 1: Pre-1933 to 1999 (00:07:39) Glass-Steagall Legislation (00:10:46) Deregulation & Rise of System 2 (00:12:27) Leverage, GFC, and System 2's Collapse (00:14:25) Basel III, Dodd-Frank, and System 3 (00:15:32) Why System 3 Could Be the Best Ever (00:19:04) Behavioral Shifts Starting in 2018 (00:19:52) The Factory Model (00:24:33) Acceleration of Factory Model (00:28:25) FRE Multiples and GP Incentives (00:34:59) Wealth Channel & Asset-Liability Mismatches (00:36:15) Why This Won’t be the Next GFC (00:45:31) AI, Creative Destruction & Opportunity (00:49:35) Alan’s One-Sheet Brain System (00:55:01) Lessons by Decade: Hui (00:59:28) Face the Tiger