Mispriced Assets Podcast

Nick Nemeth
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Investing
  • Updated Semiweekly

Mispriced Assets is a podcast about markets, credit, insurance, private equity, special situations, financial history, and the parts of the system most people overlook. I sit down with investors and industry experts to figure out where the risk is, where the opportunity is, and what the market is getting wrong. mispricedassets.substack.com

Episodes

  1. Aug 13

    The Software Reckoning | Aznaur Midov | Ep. 2

    Aznaur Midov, author of DEBT SERIOUS, joins me to talk about where private credit is actually starting to crack — and where the bearish case may be getting ahead of itself. Aznaur spent years lending to sponsor-backed software companies, so we spend a lot of time on the part of private credit I’m most worried about: software. We get into AI disruption, the 2027–2028 maturity wall, amend-and-extends, recoveries, CLOs, BDCs, leverage and what happens when lenders and private equity sponsors eventually stop being on the same side. We agree on a lot, but differ on how ugly the next few years get. Aznaur thinks sponsors and lenders have more ability to work through the maturity wall than I do. I think AI creates enough uncertainty in software that a lot of credits simply won’t be refinanceable at anything close to today’s marks. A good debate with someone who actually underwrote this stuff before everyone decided private credit was an asset class you had to own. Get full access to Mispriced Assets at mispricedassets.substack.com/subscribe

    The Software Reckoning | Aznaur Midov | Ep. 2

  2. Jul 28

    The Insurance Time Bomb | Rod Dubitsky | Ep1

    In 1989 a federal regulator let a savings and loan count a certificate as capital. It was worth nothing, and everyone who signed it knew it. A few years later the same regulator declared it worthless, and overnight the thrift went from well-capitalized to one the government could padlock on any morning. Rod Dubitsky was inside it. He called the certificate phantom capital. He is watching the same instrument today, on the balance sheets of the life insurers behind millions of American annuities, at something like a hundred times the size. That thread runs through the whole conversation, and it is where we open the show. Rod is the closest thing markets have to a control group. His first day on a mortgage desk was Black Monday, October 1987. He worked the savings-and-loan wreckage from inside the regulator. He was at Moody’s when the instrument that would take down the world was invented two desks away, and he was the Credit Suisse analyst whose downgrade call ran a year ahead of the agencies. Same method each time: build the data nobody else would, then take apart the model everyone else trusted on faith. We walk his whole career and land on what he and I are both staring at now, private credit, the insurers holding it, and the manufactured capital underneath. A FEW THINGS YOU’LL HEAR * The mortgage desk that opened the same morning the market crashed. * The rating agency where he watched single-B bonds turn into AAA on a different floor, for five times the fee. * The line he has repeated for twenty years: the absence of loss is not the absence of risk. * The meeting where a trader begged him not to scare AIG, and he did. * Twelve bonds rated AAA while the loans underneath them had already defaulted. * Why he thinks there are no A-rated insurers left, only B through F. * Why this one is bigger than 2008, and why being early feels exactly like being wrong. Late in the conversation he says the people running this would have bought the Dodgers with your money if they could. I just wrote about two insurers that did. Watch the whole thing. Ideally right before bed, then send it to anyone who needs to sleep well. ❧ ❧ ❧ For those who prefer YouTube: A companion to the first episode of the Mispriced Assets Podcast, in conversation with Rod Dubitsky. The judgments here about particular insurers and rating agencies are often shared but our own respectively, drawn from the episode and from our published research; the firms named would contest them and are entitled to. Dubitsky writes at The People’s Economist. None of this is investment advice. Get full access to Mispriced Assets at mispricedassets.substack.com/subscribe

    The Insurance Time Bomb | Rod Dubitsky | Ep1

  3. Jul 27

    The Insurance Time Bomb | Rod Dubitsky | Ep1

    Rod Dubitsky joins Mispriced Assets for Episode 1 to break down the growing collision between insurance, private credit, and Wall Street. We discuss how insurers became major buyers and financiers of private credit, the rise of asset-backed and structured insurance models, where the risks may be hiding, and why some of the same incentives have shown up before in financial history. Rod has spent decades analyzing consumer finance, credit, structured products, and insurance. In this conversation, we dig into how the system evolved, what investors may be missing, and what could ultimately cause it to break. Topics include: private credit, life insurance, annuities, reinsurance, asset managers, structured finance, leverage, credit cycles, financial history, and systemic risk. Rod's Substack: https://roddubitsky.substack.com/ Website: https://www.tpehub.com/ Twitter: https://x.com/rdubitsk Mispriced Assets — Episode 1 The Insurance Time Bomb — Rod Dubitsky 0:00 Intro 0:53 Meet Rod Dubitsky 1:36 Starting His Career on Black Monday 3:17 How Deregulation Caused the Savings & Loan Crisis 7:01 Phantom Capital and Regulatory Failure 10:39 The S&L Crisis vs. Private Credit Today 12:38 Inside Moody’s and the Birth of the ABS CDO 18:03 How Wall Street Turned Junk Into AAA 23:08 Seeing the Global Financial Crisis Coming 31:24 AIG, MBIA and the Rating Agency Reckoning 35:40 TARP, Foreclosures and the Bank Bailout 42:24 What the Financial Crisis Felt Like From the Inside 47:01 Lehman, Money Market Runs and Global Swap Lines 53:01 How Dodd-Frank Shifted Risk Into Shadow Banking 56:00 CLOs: The Same Models and the Same Flaws 1:02:02 Why Private Credit Will Be Harder to Unwind 1:03:29 BDC Leverage and the Retail Bagholder 1:09:29 How Private Credit Entered Insurance Balance Sheets 1:12:56 MassMutual, Cliffwater and Equity-Backed ABS 1:17:59 Why Every Insurer Is Being Forced to Take More Risk 1:21:00 Private Equity Roll-Ups and the Real Economy 1:26:00 Commercial Real Estate and “AAA” Defaults 1:28:59 The People’s Economist 1:31:58 How to Protect Yourself—and What Breaks the Cycle 1:33:59 Final Thoughts

    The Insurance Time Bomb | Rod Dubitsky | Ep1
  • 3 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

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About

Mispriced Assets is a podcast about markets, credit, insurance, private equity, special situations, financial history, and the parts of the system most people overlook. I sit down with investors and industry experts to figure out where the risk is, where the opportunity is, and what the market is getting wrong. mispricedassets.substack.com

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