Ozymandias

Math person.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

1 in 1,000 - dunk a basketball
1 in 6,000 - bench press 315 lbs
1 in 40,000 - $50m liquid net worth
1 in 100,000 - 2x USAMO participant
1 in 200,000 - $100m liquid net worth
1 in 400,000 - bench press 400 lbs
1 in 1,000,000 - dunk at age 50
1 in 2,000,000 - billionaire

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@mbateman @xwanyex Agreed. But whatever suffrage we decide to have, it seems obvious that it would involve both sexes ... frankly if we somehow had to pick one sex only to decide our politcal leaders, I don't see that we'd want it to be dudes. Dudes are terrible at decision making.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@mbateman @xwanyex I'm super against universal suffrage but I've never seriously considered denying women the vote.

Democracy is not the north star of political virtue; liberty is.

Democracy is every state legislature deciding if a woman can legally terminate her pregnancy.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@mbateman @xwanyex I'm super against universal suffrage but I've never seriously considered denying women the vote.

Democracy is not the north star of political virtue; liberty is.

Democracy is every state legislature deciding if a woman can legally terminate her pregnancy.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

I'm not even super right wing on questions of slavery. I'm certainly willing to consider all kinds of arrangements.

But really when you are alone on an island and no one is watching you, do you really not see any downsides to abolishing slavery? Emancipation is all positive?

[wanye @xwanyex]

I’m not even super right wing on questions of suffrage. I’m certainly willing to entertain all kinds of arrangements. But what I believe pretty strongly is that there are no intellectuals remaining on the left with respect to this stuff. I just literally don’t know how you can watch us speed run into having a girls party and a boys party and still have basically no introspection about the intersection of gender and politics beyond just, “patriarchy bad.”

Like, never, even in your darkest moments, even when you’re alone on a desert island and no one can see you or hear you and there’s no risk of you getting in trouble, do you ever think critically about the consequences of universal suffrage? Do you literally have no critiques? Do you genuinely believe there are no downsides? Will you not allow yourself to have any ordinary thoughts at all?

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@TheStalwart Let's not have these articles every day SpaceX goes up or down a lot.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@xwanyex @soblackandblue @loquitur_ponte Who has time for empathy when so much effort is going into framing bias!

(I actually appreciate your biases in my feed, as they are like easy sudoku puzzles for social and political commentary to untangle the unstated assumptions under which your view would be naturally correct)

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@loquitur_ponte @xwanyex I craft my tweets four hours.

This took 4 hours. So I get it right.

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

More likely story:

The "jailbreak" wasn't super serious (a situation anyone who has ever received bug reports is familiar with), Anthropic thought the demand to halt model was absurd, and Fed Gov used opportunity to punish and humiliate Anthropic for the prior sins of not bending knee.

Anthropic has more credibility on such topics than Washington

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@IlyaSomin @mattyglesias "We've already discussed what you are ma'am. Now we're negotiating the price."

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

You can insult me but I am much more intelligent and wealthier and happier than you, so it really is pointless.

If the CLO was effectively like having bought insurance on portfolio losses, that insurance was in-the-money / valuable, and they instead repaid it at par, then that would be a situation where they transferred value to senior and mezz. It still wouldn't be some scandal or fraud. But it's also just not the case here - they repaid MM CLO 1 where this was. These seniors and mezz weren't at discounts and saved by buying out Medallia - more likely taking it out kept OC or CCC tests from tripping, ie it was good for FSK to do this, which is why they did it.

Even if you don't understand the context, what's your theory of the case here? That KKR wanted to transfer value to the senior and mezz of their FSK CLO? Why? Because those are institutions and they want to screw their own fund because it's retail? That's not a plausible theory. That KKR affiliates own the senior and mezz? I think FSK disclosure rules that out, but also it is a bad theory of how KKR is run.

Your tweet pretty clearly claims that retail is the bag holder for defaulted loans - you oddly call it the "stop-loss" - but you do seem to understand that FSK owned this loan the whole time, sometimes through its balance sheet CLO and later directly. You think those are v different? If you're an equity guy, the delta to that loan was 99+% when they bought it out. And it v likely if anything increaed the overall value of FSK to do so, due to OC and CCC tests. But why present these facts, even the limited understanding you have of them, as something inappropriate happening, much less the smoking gun on all of private credit being a scam? It's just not even in the ballpark of that.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

I'm having a great year, but that's irrelevant to your misunderstanding.

You are claiming they did some schenanigans by taking a distressed loan out of a balance sheet CLO they refinanced. That's just an error, not understanding how these are structured or used. KKR has been doing balance sheet CLOs for 20+ years, way before the FS deal.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

Do you actually still think they did something inappropriate?

What they did is entirely normal and consistent with doing the best thing for shareholders - blathering "do better" at me makes no point. I'm telling you that taking a distressed loan out of a balance sheet CLO when refinancing it is a natural, normal thing to do as the loan owner. You're theory is that they are helping some other KKR investors or the senior debt holders of the CLO? Those theories make zero sense.

Are you just sticking with the bravado or do you actually think this is both inappropriate and an example of the problems (which there are) with public BDCs as you claimed?

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

Your error for anyone who cares to know is the equivalent of accusing someone who refinanced their mortgage even though their home price has declined of having inappropriately repaid the bank in full as part of the refinancing.

They refinanced the CLO with another CLO. And of course they took out the distressed loans, absolutely normal behavior that has zilch to do with trying to screw their BDC to help "institutions."

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@NickNemo17 @LeePrevost It's right here publicly for people to read.

You've misundertood how FS KKR uses CLO structures to finance its owned loan portfolio, so you've erroneously accused them of dumping a distressed loan on retail investors to protect other investors or themselves. You are wrong.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

You stated clearly that you believe based on the footnote and disclosure that the BDC inappropriately transferred a distressed loan from a CLO to its public BDC.

This misunderstands the situation and incorrectly interprets it as inappropriate or fraudulent when it is clearly not.

Any credit market professional should be able to correct you. For starters the BDC already had economic ownership of the distressed loan, which is why it was reporting it as in the BDC portfolio to begin with, only with a footnote to clarify that it was financed in the CLO structure.

A good faith pundit with a brain should admit when you are substantively wrong, as here. Can you do that? Or does your pompous faux-expert grift require that you not be schooled by anon accounts on Twitter?

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@MatthewSHarriso @NickNemo17 @DowdEdward He doesn't understand what he's talking about.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@LeePrevost @NickNemo17 He doesn't know what he's talking about, but year, wow is right.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

You just blatantly don't understand that FS KKR had financed their loans in a CLO and when they refinanced, they didn't put the distressed loan in that new CLO. Of course you wouldn't do that. If FS KKR were a family office, they'd do the exact same thing.

Implying this is dumping the loan on the BDC is just dumb, either misunderstanding or misrepresenting. The whole tone you take is so confident, but you don't understand how this works so you jump to the conclusion they are dumping bad positions onto retail investors. That's not even good intuition.

Hit them about the egregious fees or attack the real crux which is that these were sold as Blackstone with upfront cash payments to FAs who were allowed by rule to pocket the cash and still mark the investments, then private, at 100 before the SEC changed the rules. That was a breach of fiduciary duty abetted by Forman and FS. But hitting FSK for rolling their CLO financing just displays that you don't know what you are talking about.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

@xwanyex The structure of the Supreme Court is partially set by the Constitution and partially assigned to Congress.

Court packing is a bad idea from a rule of law perspective, but it is quite clearly Constitutional.

[Ozymandias @Fomaphobic]

These are the real data points that should inform our understanding of political economy.

Instead the younger generations are told that capitalism leads to inequality and climate change, supposedly the great ills of civilization as opposed to infant mortality and malnourishment.

[Marian L Tupy @Marian_L_Tupy]

.@PikettyWIL: Both were colonies. One embraced capitalism and the other socialism.