YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Higgins

lines on the record: 71
first: 2024-10-18
most recent: 2024-10-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And people might say, Well, why do you focus on the past? Well, focus on the past so that there is a future. I think the Lifetime Achievement Award, it is kind of, I thought they give it to dead guys, whatever, but we're not dead yet and don't plan on ever being. So we're excited about the going forward.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And counterparties, et cetera. And it sounds trite, but it is very appropriate and true that we're just beneficiaries of some amazing people that we lucky to deem us worthy over the years. It's very humbling, it's very exciting. And also, you know, it's interesting because there's always, well, why now? Why are you doing these podcasts? Or why would you do that? I guess it's really we have a story to tell and I'm very proud of King Street and the people. And I think it's a great opportunity. And it also is a sign of the times of where we are. And I think evolution personally and professionally as a firm as an institution is so critical. And I think that's part of our staying power is our desire to continuous improvement. And you look back.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an incredible honor and an honor shared by all the Kern and past people that worked at King Street. And so we are some of the effort that has put forth over the 30 years, not just the partners, and also the investors that believed in us and continue to believe in us.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, affordability has been problematic because of the supply. We're short whatever, five million homes. But the affordability is still because of that and other factors has been difficult. So, I mean, I think it's a complicated landscape on the consumer side.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, some say two, you know, it always see different numbers all the time, so it's always kind of like. Whose math, if you will.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depending on your math, one and a half two trillion of deficits, and then all these other amounts of debt around the world in the government side that is being printed to support global economies. I think at certain point we see this competition for capital, if you will, between what the public sector, government sector and the private sector is trying to. So I think it's going to be hard for rates to go low because there's still a lot of deficit spending out there. I mean, think about deficits we have when it's pretty much full employment. Economy is still pretty strong.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. LPs. Right. So you got three or three or one year extension perhaps, which three-year investing, three harvesting, and then pay out traditional, but they can vary. And so that's really having different buckets and one has to, you know, it gets complicated because you have different investors and different buckets and then there are different vintages and then they say, okay, I need distributions. Which vintage do you do and the timing? They can be, oh, I don't have money this year for next year. There's a whole planning that goes on in terms of when you launch different funds. But for us in the long short credit business, there's lots, lots of opportunities as a number of the people that we used to see all the time in the markets are no longer around. And so that we believe has shrunk the competition, if you will, in the longshore credit trading business for stress to stress. And I think also it's where are we in the cycle? Do we believe that there'll ever be a credit cycle? Do we think we'll ever have defaults again? Or will we continue to grow?”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is super interesting business. It does help feed into our long shore credit business, which is our longstanding business that we started in 1995. We also have another drawdown businesses, drawdown meaning drawdown credit, distress businesses, and those have longer duration attached to them, which is commensurate with the opportunities we're investing in. We also have a real estate business that we used to be the credit hedge fund business had what's called side pockets. A couple years ago, we removed them and just the liquid long short credit business and the side pockets come in the form of these drawdown fund structures. That is something the industry has gravitated towards the last, say, 10 years.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's opportunities that ebb and flow, and I think it's important to have the right structure. And so we have a number of business lines. We have our cloudized loan obligation business, CLO business.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were two guys 29 years old, as you know. My brother called us two guys capital, and we would go around to all the usual suspects begging for something. And we ended up, as I said, with $4 million. But, you know, Jimmy took a personal pride. And people would say, you mean, I can call this guy? He's CEO Bear Stern. I said, yeah, yeah, call him up. So he called him up. And then immediately he'd call me up. He said, you know, how did I do? You get the money yet? So it was very humbling. It was a very sweet mentor of mine as Irish Catholic kid. It was nice to have a rabbi such as Jimmy. And Vince introduced us and also Vince was incredibly helpful. So having to fathers of King Street, if you will, and they asked for nothing in return except the satisfaction that they received by seeing us grow and prosper, which was, again, very, very fortunate and blessed to have.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the first million dollars came from Jimmy Kane, who was Chairman. And Bear? Yeah, Chairman CEO of Bear Stearns. I met him through another friend of mine, Vince TC. known through golf and got to be friendly with them and he heard what I was doing and he said you know I'm happy to give you a million dollars of my money to manage and you can use my name in marketing and so you know it was it was quite comical because I have back then a list of references right it felt like I was going for a job interview asking for money back then”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So going from first Boston banking, trading distress proprietarily, then we started internal hedge fund at First Boston. And that was from 1991 to 94. So if you think about, I already had started in effect, helped form to these businesses. And so at the end of 94, again, many issues with First Boston, which became Credit Suisse, which became UBS. I think I had five CEOs I worked under for the seven, eight years. I was there. And so we said we could do this. And my co-founder and myself, we left around a few months apart in 94, formed King Street, started trading in 95. We never thought we'd start with the princely sum of $4 million, which is what we started with. We thought, oh, we're going to start with $50. All these people are like, yeah, I'll give you five. I'll give you 10, you know, no problem encouraging us to leave. So be it. We start with four.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, you know, it's in these markets as we pivot going forward. Again, if you're saying I'm going to earn five and change percent of my cash and, you know, fixed income, no problem, default rates are near zero. Now, default rates are kind of skewed a bit because you do have perhaps in high yield if you look at these liability management exercises and other restructurings out of court, it doesn't default, but then there's a lesser consideration you get for your claim. So it does factor into it. But you've had a very benign default environment as we've had a lot of money printed for quite some time. If you look at the Fed's balance sheet, the M2 that has been printed, there's been a great tailwind”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, again, passive, you know, nowadays if you look at the big banks, they're doing portfolio trading with large swaths of their institutional clients. And so some people say, I want, give me a triple B single A exposure in these industries and they go out and dial it up or down in terms of exposure, that creates opportunities within the trading market for our long short credit hedge fund, there's dislocations and opportunities to trade to make money in those situations.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, it sounds like an old cranky old guy, but when you, you know, that's the challenge of prosperity. That it doesn't really prepare oneself. Investors too, right? You know, if you always have the Fed put, if you always have, you know, just QE forever. Does have a lot of complacency, and you see it as you've gone from active to passive investing. People are like, well, why do I pay for active investing? I could just, you know, it's easy. And now is dispersion has increased in fixed income. I think it brings back the act of investing. But structurally, there's a lot of money that's gone into passive.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. And, you know, many of these things I look at growing up, gas lines in the 70s. And, you know, we had real recessions back in the 70s and 80s. These days,”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was interesting. I mean, it certainly was an indoctrination into the world of finance. You go from these big parties during the summer as you welcome to the new analyst to the market crash, obviously in October of 87. I think the volatility that ensued and then the world's going to end. And then it comes back. I think that just spoke to the resiliency of markets, but also certainly the volatility and fragility of certain sectors that one has to be mindful of. And, you know, I think ultimately there was a number of opportunities that came out. I had no money back in 87, but certainly some of the managing directors and other people that had some money, they made quite a bit. Profits on some of Left for Dead, Microsoft, and others that were just sold to very low levels.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there was certainly a number of different movements, but there was certainly downside of these things. So one had to be very rigorous in your investing in your analysis to do the investing.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say it was interesting because the mark sophistication that we have today in terms of really the fluidity of capital structures, of trading desks, et cetera, seamlessness, what you had. It was interesting you'd see things go from, say, the investment grade market to the high yield market. There was a big disconnect as they moved positions that started to trade wider. The buyers didn't have the ability to go cross assets and cross let's say ratings as they are today. You know, mutual funds were very siloed and now they're a bit wider mandates. So it was, yes, you had NIC ratings changed for your insurance companies post Drexel. And so there was a number of less liquid markets that made for quite widespread spreads. You had a default cycle. So you had trading with the crude and trading flat.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we started out. I started out banking, the two year banking program, which merchant banking was the group I was in. My co-founder was an analyst. He came into Yale. He was in the bankruptcy advisory group. So we're in the analyst program together, 65 of us. And after two years, I went down to trade distress proprietarily. I got promoted to associate with outgoing business school. I had done undergraduate business and felt that, you know, hey, I can do this. But I want to get something different rather than the analyst that never left. I want to get some markets experience, but stay in the proprietary side. So there was a proprietary trading group that was forming and I was joined that. And it was interesting time in high yield as shortly thereafter Drexel, which goes from one day issuing commercial paper, and the next day they go bankrupt.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First two years electrical engineering, you graduated from high school. I'm good at math and science. And I always had an idea what go into business, but I felt that electrical engineering would be a good foundation. And that's what I started at. But after two years, it was sort of not very interesting. And I was intrigued by the markets at the time in the mid-80s. You had a lot of stuff going on in terms of the merger boom. And Wall Street was rocking. And I said, hey, this is sort of interesting. Electrical engineering major that had a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. So my roommate who was a mechanical engineer said to me, what are you doing? Why don't you just switch over to finance? Which I said, sure.”
2024-10-18 · Masters in Business · King Street's Brian Higgins On Navigating Distressed Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source