Blackstone的Stephen Schwarzman不会浪费严重的危机

In November 2008, just weeks after Lehman Brothers Holdings filed for bankruptcy and the U.S. government was forced to bail out insurance giant American International Group, incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously told a reporter that “you never want to let a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Five years after the worst financial crisis since the Depression, it seems that Blackstone Group co-founder, chairman and CEO Stephen Schwarzman took that advice to heart. Blackstone Group has been one of the biggest winners in the wake of the crisis, doubling its assets under management from $90 billion to $218 billion during the past five years. Much of that growth has come from the 2008 acquisition of credit manager GSO Capital Partners, run by three partners who had turned Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (later Credit Suisse) into the No. 1 underwriter of high-yield debt on Wall Street. GSO gave Blackstone access to investment strategies that would do well as the economy fell off the cliff. Since the acquisition, GSO’s assets have grown fivefold and rival those of Blackstone’s real estate and private equity businesses. Senior Writer Julie Segal spoke to Schwarzman recently about the GSO acquisition, the advantage that U.S. financial services firms now have in Europe, and the expanded role that money managers are playing as the banks contract.

GSO显然是黑石成功收购。你是如何看到它拟合在组织中的？

当我们在1985年开始,公司决定in three lines of business. The first and second were the M&A advisory business and private equity. The third part of our strategy, which we’re still executing on, is to go after new businesses that had to meet a few criteria. First, it has to be a great business with terrific expansion potential. We don’t want a lot of little businesses; we want to be in relatively few complementary ones where we can be the global leader. Second, we want people who are 10s on a scale of 1 to 10. Third, the business has to make our existing businesses stronger by bringing intellectual capital to the table that we didn’t have.

GSO fit those criteria. GSO produces intellectual capital that can be used throughout Blackstone and GSO leverages information, where appropriate, that comes out of our real estate, private equity and other groups. As the largest investor in leveraged loans in the world, GSO gives us a unique look into what’s going on in the credit markets. And Blackstone gives GSO access to a lot of deals that they might not otherwise see. So, part of the secret sauce at Blackstone is that we can create and harvest intellectual capital and insights across all four of our major investing businesses and our advisory business. And not just on an industry basis, but geographically. We don’t need an economist to tell us what’s happening in the world. We see it.

由于较小的角色银行正在借给困境的企业，GSO有一个非常不同的机会。告诉我们这一点。

对于许多金融机构来说，监管环境已经变得更加限制和困难。欧洲特别是现在有各种各样的问题。但是欧洲非常困难，将问题充分睡觉。即使欧洲银行系统仍然需要重大修复，它需要一段时间。虽然正在进行，但某些借款人获得信贷的能力被禁止，这为GSO等公司创造了机会。

您认为监管机构是否会涉及监督这种活动？

像我们这样的公司通过与我们的投资者的金钱审慎，在金融危机中避免了麻烦。我们必须在没有联邦或主权担保的情况下在开放市场上竞争我们的资金。人们用银行存入金钱，因为他们认为他们的金钱不仅受到金融机构本身的保护，而且是由政府受到保护。我们没有那个。我们没有看到限制，因为我们在没有任何“贷款人的贷款人”的情况下，他们站在我们身后，我们在金融体系中没有同样的核心作用。

在许多方面，似乎黑石现在比在危机面前更强大。

在某些领域，我们的竞争对手较少，所以它很好。但整个系统确实受到挑战。正如你可以在欧洲看到的那样，当你有很强的法规并且你有一个萎缩的银行系统时，很难获得经济增长。几乎任何人都会告诉你。如果你无法赚钱，你会如何成长？负增长环境创造了其他政治问题。当然，这很复杂。

对黑石有什么影响？

One of the advantages that we have is that the American financial institutions are in much better shape than the European ones. What you’re starting to see is a normal pattern where firms like ours go to non-U.S. locations and our banks tend to follow. We can get financing where domestic people can’t. It provides a competitive advantage for which we have to thank [former Treasury secretary] Tim Geithner for doing a good job putting the U.S. banking system in a better position with the stress tests and capital raising.

现在美国银行体系是借贷的。看看企业资产负债表上的大量现金。银行将不会在2008 - 2009年贷款，因此公司基本上创建了自己的银行，偿还债务交易并保留其资产负债表上的收益。除了为公司提供不拨打他们的银行的原因，否则没有宗旨。这对我们有好处，其工作是购买公司，购买房地产并做其他类型的投资。所以，正如他们所说，它实际上是不是那么糟糕。