黑石集团’s GSO Capital: Lenders of Last Resort

霍诺尼亚企业首席执行官Ara Hovnanian，在去年的信贷替代资产经理之前，在努力的替代资产经理在艰苦的替代品经理举行了艰苦的替代品。Douglas Ostrover，在GSO中的“O”邀请他于2012年7月在曼哈顿的核心俱乐部午餐，就像美国住房市场呈现出一些生活迹象一样。当时-54岁的首席执行官认为，他几乎没有听奥斯特罗弗的沥青丢失。他的公司一直在流血六年，并耗尽了它的每一分钱，可以发布担保债务。没有银行愿意借给它，新泽西州的Homebuilder已成为短销售商的目标;投资者投注数十亿美元的信贷违约互换，即霍纳尼亚州的父亲和三名叔叔在1959年成立的巨大款项将会左右。奥洛南亚，曾经通过几个房地产周期过，当奥斯特罗弗告诉他霍维南人的五年CDS合约的价格暗示违约可能性93％时，遭到震惊。“市场正在说你要破产，”奥斯特罗弗补充道。

静止,私人股本巨头旗下的黑人tone Group, had spent six months digging into the finances of Hovnanian and had been buying up its equity, secured debt and unsecured debt since March. Ostrover, now 50, who helped build the leveraged-finance business at investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette during the 1990s, explained his idea for solving Hovnanian’s liquidity problems. The company would sell its property inventory to a land bank created by GSO in return for a $125 million cash infusion. Over time GSO would sell the land back to the homebuilder. Ostrover asserted that not only would the market react positively to the initial financing but that the GSO-Blackstone brand would signal that there could be more behind it. “Look, the market hates your company,” he told Hovnanian. “We love your company.”

(Ostrover had his own hard-luck family bankruptcy story: His grandfather had to shutter Ostrover’s Smoked Fish on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1950s following a blackout; he couldn’t pay his creditors because his customers’ fish had rotted.)

霍维南，为了他的一部分，并不相信，随着俄罗斯奥特弗建议，市场将尽可能地反应。“If you’ve been out in the battlefield for seven years, being shot at constantly, you don’t know what to do if the bullets stop flying,” he told Ostrover, who left the lunch uncertain whether the CEO would agree to his plan.

霍维南软化前花了一周，但GSO得到了交易。实际上，当霍瓦南人于2012年7月13日宣布土地银行业交易时，其股票上涨，其高级担保债务从84美元到97美分，而CDS合同的价格崩溃了。交易员博览公司损失了钱。股票于2012年7月至今年年底之间增长了170％。J.P. Morgan and other Wall Street research firms changed their rating from a sell to a hold — GSO had been hoping for a buy — and Credit Suisse refinanced Hovnanian’s high-cost debt that was coming due in 2016 and that the naysayers were sure would sink the company.

“They did their homework, and they were convinced that the market was underestimating our ability to succeed in a space — housing — that they thought was recovering,” says Hovnanian. Eleven months later the U.S. housing rebound is official and Hovnanian Enterprises is flourishing, expecting 2013 to be its first profitable year since 2006. Hovnanian was the largest position in GSO’s flagship hedge fund in 2012, and the firm made 50 percent on its capital in six months.

GSO has provided much-needed credit to scores of troubled companies like Hovnanian that couldn’t tap public markets or get bank loans. The firm has financed well-known names like Chesapeake Energy Corp., struggling with weak natural-gas prices and controversy around its ex-CEO and needing capital to develop lucrative energy projects, and Sony Corp. while also providing $650 million of capital to smaller homebuilding companies like the U.K.’s Miller Group and $888 million to companies in Europe last year, including Canberra Industries, Welcome Break and EMI Music Publishing. As one of the largest creditors of MBIA and holders of its equity, GSO had a big win last month when the Armonk, New York–based provider of municipal bond insurance finally settled a dispute with Bank of America Corp. after years of wrangling over troubled mortgage-backed securities.

“在过去的过去，银行可能更愿意为长期的客户提供资产负债表，”Bennett Goodman，Gso的56岁的“G”说，他在Drexel Burnham Lambert开始了他的职业生涯20世纪80年代。“由于监管环境，他们在经济上努力做到这一点。因此，银行希望将风险转化为市场 - 汇集道路展览会和200名投资者。但他们不想致力于他们的资本。另一方面，我们想要拥有风险。“

ostrov GSO创始人古德曼and Tripp Smith have emerged as lenders of last resort, filling the gaping financing void left by banks and opportunistic hedge funds in the wake of the 2008–’09 financial crisis. The firm follows in the footsteps of  Drexel and Michael Milken, who in the 1980s invented the junk bond market for non-investment-grade companies. In the 1990s, GSO’s three founders, then working for Hamilton (Tony) James at DLJ, took up where Drexel left off, building that firm into the No. 1 leveraged-finance player, lending to blemished companies that were in some of the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy, including energy exploration and homebuilding. If Drexel came up with the junk bond and DLJ created the institutional leveraged-finance market, GSO is again reinventing the concept of providing capital to non-investment-grade companies — this time as an asset manager.

静止——古德曼开玩笑地称之为“战争ren Buffett of the dregs” — is at the center of a reshaped Wall Street, where newly chastened banks are retreating to traditional roles as advisers to corporations, underwriting bonds for only the most highly rated companies and riskless deals. Since the financial crisis investment banks have been deleveraging and governments around the world have imposed stricter capital requirements on financial institutions, as the U.S. is doing with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. But it’s the as-yet-unfinalized Volcker rule that does the most damage to banks’ freedom, preventing them from engaging in proprietary trading or lending their own capital in speculative deals like the one to rescue Hovnanian.

“In the era of Dodd-Frank and the Volcker rule, GSO and others like it, with their ability to make commitments, have more market power than ever,” says Brian O’Neil, chief investment officer of the $9 billion-in-assets Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the U.S.’s largest philanthropic organization focused on public health and one of GSO’s first investors.

Banks may no longer have the balance sheets, but big institutional investors like sovereign wealth funds, endowments and pension funds do. To be sure, Blackstone is not the only manager to have smelled opportunity in the financing void. Depending on the product, GSO has a host of competitors, including Apollo Group Management; Ares Capital Corp. (an Apollo spin-out); Avenue Capital Group; Carlyle Group; Goldman, Sachs & Co.; J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s Highbridge Capital Management; KKR & Co.; Oaktree Capital Management; and TPG Capital.

James Coulter, co-founder of private equity firm TPG, says the opportunity is much more attractive for managers and investors now that banks — which threw cheap money from depositors at troubled companies’ financing problems and pocketed the profit — are not in the mix. “There is a place for capital formation at market rates of return and driven by problem solvers,” explains Coulter. “It’s alternative credit growing up. It’s not the Wild West, not the personality-driven days of 20 years ago. And this is good for the economy.”  TPG launched its own midmarket lender after the financial crisis and has both competed and partnered with GSO.

Goodman, Smith and Ostrover founded GSO in 2005 to provide capital to non-investment-grade cyclical companies that were going through a tough patch but had tangible assets to put up as collateral to protect the firm’s downside when it lent them money. GSO was an early investor in the shale gas industry, which has been whipsawed by volatile pricing and other events. “They have a zealous approach to protecting capital, and they’ve found a way to extend credit to organizations that need it and structure it in a way that takes advantage of the environment at the time,” says Blackstone chairman, CEO and co-founder Stephen Schwarzman.

In 2008, Blackstone, looking to diversify, paid $1 billion to acquire GSO, which then had a $3.2 billion credit hedge fund, $500 million in mezzanine investments and a $4.8 billion collateralized loan obligation business. The deal wouldn’t have happened without Goodman, Smith and Ostrover’s former boss, Tony James, who had joined Blackstone as president in 2002 after Credit Suisse bought DLJ and who manages the firm’s day-to-day operations. “This was more like a family reunion than an acquisition,” says Schwarzman.

“Credit to Steve, he really trusted me on this one,” adds James, who says Blackstone was looking for an area of asset management with room to grow that would complement its existing private equity, real estate and fund-of-hedge-funds businesses. “What was a wide-open white space for us? Credit jumped off the page.”

With $58 billion in assets under management and 235 employees, GSO has grown fivefold under the Blackstone umbrella. Today it offers $27 billion in alternative-investment funds, including the now $4 billion hedge fund, $8 billion in mezzanine funds — financing buyouts for private equity — $8 billion in rescue lending and $7 billion in small-cap direct lending. The firm’s long-only strategies include a $24 billion CLO business, making GSO the largest institutional investor in leveraged loans, as well as closed-end and other funds. Goodman is quick to credit the Blackstone brand for at least part of GSO’s success. “If we were Schmeckle & Schmeckle or just stand-alone GSO, there’s no way the board of Sony or some of these other companies would have gone along with some no-name firm,” he explains.

GSO的回报是顶部四分位数。根据外部营销证件，其对冲基金自2010年1月以来，其对冲基金已达到13.6％的净返回，而HFRI基金加权综合汇率同期返回4.6％。(Though the hedge fund was launched in 2005, GSO has since stripped out mezzanine and other investments into separate funds.) The firm’s mezzanine fund has one of the best records in the industry, up an average of 19.9 percent a year net since inception in July 2007. Rescue lending has returned an annualized 15.2 percent since inception in September 2009. “The GSO team has been through the ups and downs of numerous credit cycles, and they’re always worried and trying to protect the downside,” says Timothy Walsh, chief investment officer of the $74 billion New Jersey Pension Fund, which has committed to $1.1 billion in investments in five GSO funds.

Blackstone的收购GSO是一个无可争议的赢家。GSO占该公司2180亿美元资产的26.6％，符合其590亿美元的房地产业务，比其私募股权（520亿美元）和Blackstone替代资产管理对冲基金（480亿美元）业务。GSO代表了2012年最终获得的Blackstone的38.9百万美元，占该公司的绩效费用，占该公司去年的经济净收入的16％。2007年，公司的绩效费用的高峰，私募股权贡献了总数的大部分。在2005年至2012年期间，GSO的资产以29％的增长率增长。这使得GSO Blackstone在盈利和资产方面的增长最快。两位公开交易替代品的高管表示，他们对黑石作为私募股权的竞争对手并不是那么多担心，但他们被GSO的增长所蒙蔽了。虽然受到金融危机的伤害，但是Blackstone和GSO已经成为其后果的主要球员。自2008年以来，Blackstone的资产增加了一倍多。

与此同时，GSO正在利用银行留下的无效，它还受益于历史低利率和不懈的投资者对信贷投资的需求。虽然非投资级公司需要资本，但投资者需要收益率，而GSO提供的替代信贷策略则提供诸如债券投资组合的赔偿金的备份增压。“现在，股票投资者拥有私募股权的替代信贷镜子的出现，”TPG的Coulter说。

The future looks bright for credit investing. Remnants of the financial crisis continue to cast a shadow on markets, especially in Europe. When Smith was pitching deals at Credit Suisse, he was constantly being undercut by in-country banks. “You couldn’t hope to compete because the banks were so aggressive,” he says. As a result, the high-yield and leveraged-loan markets never developed in Europe to the extent they did in the U.S. But that’s starting to change as European banks need to deleverage and raise capital and companies desperately require funding. GSO is hoping to be a big part of the transformation.

在20世纪80年代，华尔街有明确的啄食顺序。顶部是三家白鞋公司：第一个波士顿公司，高盛和摩根士丹利。如果你是哈佛大学学生，那就是你想要降落工作的地方。1983年初，这三家公司将招聘人员送到校园，Bennett Goodman正在打篮球;当游戏进入加班时，他到达了太晚了，无法进入拥挤的蓝筹演示。

那天唯一开放是德雷克尔，即使它主导了非投资级公司的融资业务，这是德雷德尔的德雷克尔底部。耶和华从来没有听说过这家公司，但他清晰地记得弗雷德里克约瑟夫，德塞尔首席执行官，热情地讲述它如何融资企业家，婚姻资本思想，并深刻地改变了整个产业。“我为它挂钩，线条和沉没者，”耶和华说。“我喜欢失败者。”   While his friends at Harvard — including one he describes as having had pinstripes on his diapers — did summer internships at Wall Street’s toniest firms, Goodman took a job with Drexel.

墨守挤奶领导着现在称之为资本筹集的民主化，为中小型公司提供资金，这些公司被履行为融资和吹嘘投资者的乐观和困境公司，尽管存在短期困境。在这个过程中，德雷德尔帮助激发了美国前所未有的繁荣时代。作为TED特纳特的特纳贸易系统等公司，Craig McCaw的麦考蜂窝通信和William McGowan的MCI通信公司通过使用这个新可用的资本来源迅速扩展。垃圾债券也推动了20世纪80年代的杠杆收购，当时kkr目标公司曾经将聋耳带到股东需求。

1984年获得MBA后，迈阿密出生的古德曼在纽约举行了一份全职工作。他在那里度过了五年，每年吃十到12个交易 - 他们所有人都不同 - 在一种奖励街头聪明和疯狂职业道德的文化中。亚慱体育app怎么下载Drexel是一个分析师在Dicey公司密集的金融资金埋葬的日子的地方。该公司磨练了看丑陋财务状况所需的技能，并确定公司和投资者融资的商业可行性。In contrast to the few traditional deals a year that a junior banker at Goldman might work on, Goodman cut his teeth on such unusual transactions as KKR’s investment in Union Texas Petroleum Holdings in 1985 and Maxam’s 1986 takeover of Pacific Lumber Co. For the latter he and Joshua Friedman, then head of the capital markets group at Drexel, came up with a term sheet for a zero-coupon increasing-rate note whose complexity and model they still laugh about.

1987年，洛杉矶的挤奶员称为古德曼，这次是在洛博斯上专注于洛博斯，告诉他他应该搬到比佛利山庄和为弗里德曼工作（谁将继续为共同发现的对冲基金公司峡谷资本顾问）。但在他的妻子，梅格，拒绝离开纽约，善意迅速将他的景点设置在DLJ，这是一个为股权研究而闻名的中型投资银行和一定的丑陋和创业文化。亚慱体育app怎么下载Garrett Moran在DLJ中担任高收益债券集团，说，Goodman说，六个月后，希望为一家资本市场的观点推出他的想法。

Goodman liberally quotes from his uncle, Skip Bertman, a former head coach at Louisiana State University who has the best baseball record in the National Collegiate Athletic Association and who took an influential role in Goodman’s life after his father passed away when he was five years old. Bertman, who built an underdog team into a profitable legend for LSU, told Goodman that success took three “H”s: hard work (in an interview his uncle calls that hustle), honesty and humility.

Hard work got him noticed at Drexel, as well as a meeting with Moran. But Goodman shunted humility aside — at least temporarily — during his lunch with Moran. The 30-year-old newly minted Drexel vice president told the DLJ executive, “I’m going to help build this big business at DLJ, and you’re going to get rich and famous.” Moran, who says he instantly liked Goodman and the wealth of experience he had gotten working on deals inside the Drexel pressure cooker, hired him. “He might have been young, but it was like a pro coming into an amateur team,” adds James, who then ran DLJ’s investment bank.

In early 1988, Goodman started building the capital markets business at DLJ under Moran and James. At that time, Drexel had a lock on the business. Take the “highly confident letter,” a piece of paper Drexel would issue to the board of a company as a promise that it would provide financing on deals. When DLJ tried issuing its own highly confident letters, they meant nothing, as DLJ had a small balance sheet. So the firm created the bridge loan, not promising capital but intended to tide the company over until it could obtain permanent financing. “On the strength of that bridge loan business, we built ourselves up into the leading firm,” says James.

In September 1988 the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Drexel for insider trading and stock manipulation. The following March, Milken was indicted for racketeering and securities fraud. In February 1990, Drexel filed for bankruptcy; two months later Milken pled guilty to lesser charges, agreeing to pay a $600 million fine and serve ten years in jail. (The sentence was later reduced to two years.)

With Drexel and Milken gone amid a recession, many market watchers thought high-yield financing would die. But although most Wall Street firms pulled out of the high-yield business, DLJ stayed in, doing some secondary trading and working with companies that felt they had been abandoned. When the markets rebounded in 1991, DLJ took over as a leading player.

1992年，Goodman聘请了授予委员证券，精品投资银行Wassertein Perella＆Co.的高收益架，运行DLJ的销售和交易。Ostrover, who has a BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, was ranked the No. 1 salesperson by a third-party consulting firm, and Goodman and Moran decided to steal him away the day the news came out.

While Goodman loves to talk, Ostrover has to be pressed for details. He reveres his middle-class upbringing — first in Queens, New York, and later in Stamford, Connecticut — and says that when he was growing up he didn’t know anyone who worked on Wall Street. Apologizing for the seeming hokeyness of it, he refers to a black-and-white picture in his office of New York’s Orchard Street early in the past century, with unpaved, muddy roads; pushcarts; and a glimpse of Ostrover’s Smoked Fish.

1993年，Goodman聘请了Salomon Smith Barney的史密斯，在那里他在重组上工作。史密斯从Drexel加入了Salomon，在破产期间与一群人一起离开。在圣母院大学两年中，他见证了Figher Toll Drexel的失败，高级管理人员，其财富在其股票中被捆绑在一起。史密斯是他印第安纳波利斯爱尔兰家族的第三代，毕业于天主教大学;他四个孩子中的两个目前正在那里学习。

Goodman and Ostrover joke that Smith was responsible for DLJ’s success. The year he joined, the firm became the No. 1 underwriter for high-yield bonds, a distinction it would keep for 12 years. Drexel had unwittingly passed the high-yield baton to DLJ. Though the three founders couldn’t be more different, they’ve maintained their partnership without a blip for 20 years. Goodman is the storyteller of the group, Ostrover is Mr. Markets, and Smith wants to stay out of the limelight and just do deals. Though the three are equal partners at GSO, Smith and Ostrover often defer to Goodman for the final word.

1995年，莫兰搬到了固定收益的首席运营官，古德曼接管了所有杠杆融资。DLJ采用其市场地位，以继续在公司中再投资，建立杠杆贷款能力，并创造衍生品业务和大苦恼单位。本集团发明了诸如支付拨款的概念，发行人能够在未来换取更大的优惠券的息息支付，以及IPO雕刻，母公司向公众销售子公司的股票。在20世纪90年代末，DLJ客户的客户施瓦茨曼要求善意在黑石开始信用业务。这是众多推翻黑石高管的第一款对他来说。

It was DLJ’s limited balance sheet that taught Goodman, Ostrover and Smith how careful they had to be with their credit analysis and due diligence. There was little room for error. “You had to figure things out and use your smarts instead of brute strength,” Smith, 47, says. By 1999, however, DLJ was hamstrung by its small balance sheet and a business that was primarily domestic. Competition from increasingly bigger banks was fierce. The world had changed, and the firm needed a partner.

瑞士信贷(Credit Suisse)在2000年以115亿美元收购了帝杰and combined the firm with its New York–based investment banking unit, Credit Suisse First Boston. The big Swiss bank wanted Goodman’s leveraged-finance business as well as DLJ’s merchant banking and real estate groups. Though DLJ investment banking staffers left in droves after the deal — including James, though he stayed two years as part of the merger agreement — Goodman, Smith and Ostrover flourished. Even before James left CSFB, he and Goodman talked about going off on their own. After James joined Blackstone, Goodman took over CSFB’s alternative capital division. Shortly thereafter Ostrover assumed responsibility for leveraged finance and Smith joined Goodman in the alternatives group. What the three founders have built at GSO, they originally planned for CSFB.

But in June 2004, John Mack, then CEO of CSFB in the U.S., announced he was leaving; the Credit Suisse board had decided not to renew his contract. It was a good time for Goodman, Smith and Ostrover to start their own firm. By that July the three partners had launched GSO with 25 employees and one hedge fund. The firm had purchased a small CLO group, run by Daniel Smith, from Royal Bank of Canada. Smith, who had been co-head of   high-yield group among other positions at  Van Kampen Investments, now runs GSO’s customized credit strategies, including CLOs, closed-end funds and Franklin Square Capital Partners, its small-cap direct lending group.

在一天的一天，瑞士斯省公司向该公司提供了超过5亿美元的管理 - 从外部投资者提出的大约30亿美元的大部分，包括低音兄弟，黑石，康奈尔大学，K2顾问，Metlife，Notre Dame和Quellos集团（现在由Blackrock拥有）。GSO的对冲基金投资公共证券，夹层债务和令人痛苦的债务，并为通过流动性问题提供了一些救援借款。

80%的静止的高级管理团队s from DLJ. Jason New, a onetime bankruptcy lawyer who had been with DLJ since 1999 and worked on some of the most complex distressed deals, such as financing Level 3 Communications and Qwest Communications, joined GSO at the start. He now manages its hedge fund. A month after its launch, GSO hired Donald (Dwight) Scott, who ran the energy practice at DLJ before joining El Paso Corp. in 2000. Houston-based Scott oversees GSO’s energy group.

In 2007, Merrill Lynch & Co. took a minority stake in GSO and the firm had its first closing for a new mezzanine fund. But its deals remained small, providing funding for companies like Pacific Lumber and Caffè Nero, a U.K. coffeehouse chain. Though it was satisfying to be on their own, Goodman, Ostrover and Smith were used to being No. 1 and having a big firm behind them. But things were changing, and they would get their chance soon.

WHEN ASKED ABOUT HIS DECISION to switch from the sell side to the buy side, Goodman says his only regret is that he didn’t make the move ten years earlier. Though he loved working on Wall Street, particularly at DLJ, Goodman wanted to spend all his time investing. “At a bank you’re working for anonymous shareholders, trying to make as much money as you can,” he explains. “It’s amorphous, and you don’t know the people. It’s a different kind of satisfaction walking into the CIO’s office for the Bass brothers.”

A deal between Blackstone and GSO, however, wasn’t a no-brainer. Private equity investors are by nature optimistic and swaggering, thinking every deal is a potential blockbuster. Blackstone’s offices on Park Avenue are nothing short of glitzy, with unobstructed views of the New York skyline and floors connected by grand staircases with polished metal banisters. No one has represented Blackstone’s opulence more than its billionaire co-founder Schwarzman, who in 2000 reportedly paid $37 million for a 34-room triplex on Park Avenue and has owned vacation properties in the Hamptons; Jamaica; Palm Beach, Florida; and Saint-Tropez.

另一方面，信贷投资者是悲观主义者，意识到他们的投资的上行期有限，评估可能出错的一切努力保护他们的校长。信用怪人古信，奥斯特罗弗和史密斯仍然在2007年春天的纽约皮埃尔酒店前往布莱克通的奢侈路上展会，这是第一次对公众提供有关私募股权公司的颗粒细节。在他离开DLJ的黑石之后，三重奏仍然靠近詹姆斯，他们知道他有兴趣袭击某种类型的交易。在路演期间，Blackstone披露了其数量，展示了私募股权，房地产和对冲基金资金的乏力，但信誉是一个事后，达到50亿美元的资产。与此同时，Blackstone与世界上几乎所有主要的机构投资者都有关系，这一集团平均每年投资2亿美元的资产。亚博赞助欧冠相比之下，GSO的投资者与Goodman，Ostrover和Smith一起投资了2200万美元。GSO也依赖于美林林奇和信贷瑞士，这两者都在次贷危机的早期感受到压力。

Any deal would hinge on James, who was revered by GSO’s three founders. That summer James approached Goodman — the fourth time Blackstone had tried to entice him into a deal — and stated the obvious: “In credit we’re not where we want to be. We want to buy you.”

经过六个月的谈判后，善意和他的合作伙伴说是的。虽然他们喜欢成为自己的老板，但他们错过了声望，以及作为一个大型组织的一部分。与Blackstone一起，他们将获得规模，一个品牌，想法与公司的交易制造商分享，并访问新的和更大的客户。史密斯称自己为先生的过程，是对融合的最不热情，关心他们正在交易他们的自主权。但10亿美元的价格标签 - 合作伙伴汇入GSO基金的收益 - 以及利用他们所认为的潜力将在华尔街上巨大转变，帮助减轻了他们的关注。

“Blackstone allowed us to take our business from being three years old to ten overnight,” Ostrover says.

GSO and Blackstone announced the deal in January 2008. In addition to strengthening their firm’s credit business, Schwarzman and James saw benefits for its private equity operation. “Having a better understanding of credit markets, having a better idea of how we could finance a creative idea, would make us better in private equity,” says James. “GSO was very synergistic and complemented our other businesses well.”

蜜月结束很快。在2008年我们re on and the credit crisis gathered steam, GSO started putting money to work. In August the group put up $1 billion in equity to buy a portfolio of busted bridge loans from Deutsche Bank, with the German bank providing 3-to-1 leverage. The approximately $4 billion portfolio was distributed across GSO’s own funds as well as Blackstone’s private equity portfolios. The next month Lehman Brothers Holdings filed for bankruptcy and all hell broke loose. Loan prices dropped 30 points, obliterating almost the entire investment — at least on paper. The Deutsche Bank portfolio was marked to about 5 cents on the dollar for the quarter ended March 31, 2009. GSO had partnered with TPG to buy a $2 billion portfolio of bridge loans from Citigroup. That also plummeted in value.

As it turned out, GSO had done thorough credit analysis and structured the debt appropriately, and it made 1.5 times its investment in two years, with every company paying off its debts. “Writing something down to zero is not your proudest moment,” Goodman says. But by the end of 2009, the firm had $24 billion in assets.

在2009年市场触底后，GSO推出了首次救援贷款基金，该基金收于33亿美元。明年它从盟军首都公司获得了九章，一年后，它购买了Harbourmaster资本管理，获得了100亿美元的欧洲杠杆贷款经理，以及来自联盟爱尔兰银行的四个结束。

在这五年的黑石折叠中，GSO已从拥有两项基金产品管理27.其基金的广度和规模允许它为公司提供一系列解决方案，包括救援融资和高级担保银行贷款。与此同时，平台将其它不同的眼睛赋予潜在的投资。GSO通过其CLO业务来欣赏大约1,000家公司，赢得了可以传递给对冲基金或其他车辆的领导。还可以共享投资。Hovnanian交易源于对冲基金，但后来扩大到包括救援融资基金。“我们站在这个非常繁忙的街角并查看所有这项活动，”定制的信用策略合作伙伴Daniel Smith说。在Blackstone下，GSO有重点写得足够大的检查来完全资助解决方案，减少了公司在其他地方找到额外资金的需求。

GSO的旗舰对冲基金采取活动家或事件驱动的信誉。新的团队寻找经历某种动荡的公司，例如曼联与曼联战斗等契约违约，债务成熟，监管变革，破产或法律纠纷。但与活动家股权经理或“贷款自行”的信用基金不同，除非出现问题，否则GSO不会寻求改变管理，它别无选择。它希望留下报纸的前面。

The firm, which has a competitive advantage by doing most of its own loan originations and investing in companies that are No. 1 or 2 in their markets, looks at about 1,000 deals every year and completes fewer than 5 percent of those. Every Monday the investment staff meets to go over ideas and review the pipeline. GSO now has offices in New York, London, Dublin and Houston.

GSO和Blackstone积极分享信息。瑞安·米尔特（Ryan Mollett）是2011年加入了新的Blackrock集团的34岁的常任伙伴，那一年介绍了一个纸张，因为住房市场已经触底了。Blackstone的房地产集团看到了类似的证据，并根据其潜在的对冲基金的结果基于其潜在的抵押贷款改善。由于不同的黑石集团之间的累积研究，私募股权购买了2.2亿美元的不正常住宅贷款，房地产队购买了14亿美元的单一家庭住宅租赁，而GSO投资于霍瓦南。在其高峰期，GSO为475万美元的对冲基金接触本土人及相关行业，并在私人市场车辆上投放6亿美元的融资。

The Capital Solutions Fund — GSO’s rescue lending vehicle — is an object lesson in the maturation of alternative credit. In the old days highly cyclical companies in trouble could sell control to a competitor, a private equity firm or a hedge fund firm that took a loan-to-own strategy. In all cases the company would likely be giving up control at the bottom of the market. In contrast, GSO will take a minority stake, a seat on the board and a debtlike investment that pays a big double-digit coupon, but it will let management retain control. “We decided that the banking system is a mess globally, so let’s raise some money to lend to more troubled private companies that can’t tap the markets and don’t have access to the banks,” says Ostrover.

Part of GSO’s success comes from leaving some money on the table. Goodman states the obvious: “No company does business with us because we’re such nice guys, though we like to think we are. They do it because they can’t get the capital otherwise.” And many companies say GSO doesn’t scrape every penny out of a deal. “I don’t feel like I’m going to get my throat ripped out when I call GSO,” says one CEO who has done multiple deals with the company.

GSO LIKES A LITTLE, BUT NOT TOO much, market misery. Well before the downgrade of the U.S.’s credit rating in August 2011, GSO was busy preparing for the possibility that markets would freeze up if the rating agencies made good on their threats. It was keeping up-to-date in its credit work on certain companies and identifying potential situations for investment. “It’s really hard for some people to be aggressive in times of disruption because you have to do your work beforehand,” says partner Smith.

GSO put about $5 billion of capital to work as the markets slid after the downgrade. For its drawdown funds alone, it committed $3 billion to 26 companies. Its investments included City Ventures, a private homebuilder in Orange County, California, now planning to go public; EMI Music Publishing; Energy Alloys, a global provider of oil field metals; Spain’s Giant Cement Holding; and the U.K.’s Miller Group.

该公司融资了索尼的购买EMI，给出日本电子制造商访问披头士乐队中包含200多首歌曲的音乐目录。当索尼试图在2011年秋天购买EMI时，它无法将所有债务整合到其资产负债表上，而不会降级。索尼向每个人都去了，包括日本的银行，但无法获得5亿美元的桥梁贷款。该公司最初接近Blackstone的私募股权集团，持续5亿美元的股权，但它想要一个控股股份，索尼不会那样做到这一点。Blackstone将索尼推荐给GSO，该公司在公司制作了夹层债务和股权权证。

“Many investors are quite cautious when evaluating entertainment deals — especially institutions,” says Rob Wiesenthal, then Sony’s CFO and now chief operating officer of    Warner Music Group. “But the GSO team immediately understood the annuity-like cash flow streams of music publishing and how much less volatile it is than recorded music and less subject to the decline of physical recorded media.”

Wiesenthal补充说，GSO足够灵活，让亿万富翁大卫林根，也是投资者，参加比赛中的交易。“大卫格芬是娱乐业的沃伦巴菲特，他们理解这笔交易的价值，”他解释道。“许多投资者不知道如何接近这一点。”

GSO also bought the debt of Clear Channel Communications, a private-equity-owned media company, and led a $1.25 billion preferred stock deal for Chesapeake Energy so that company could develop natural-gas production from shale in eastern Ohio.

目前的市场状况为GSO的许多未来机会设定了舞台。年度高收益率发行不仅仅是2006年和2007年的双倍，

61 percent of bonds are trading at or above their call prices, and new issuance of covenant-lite leveraged loans in 2012 surpassed the levels seen during the credit craze in the middle of the past decade. “When the high-yield market trades at highs, we put out less capital,” says Ostrover. “As the market comes down, we put out a lot. Let’s face it, if a company can tap the public markets, they will, and they’ll get a much better deal.”

GSO团队相信，未来的未来投资者预计将迟早会失去光泽，无论是朝鲜，以色列还是伊朗的华盛顿或隆隆声。所有这些契约贷款都将在某些时候成为GSO的巨大机会。与此同时，它已经削减了投资步伐，并且在工业部门，包括运输，金属和采矿和天然气的工业部门才能追随最令人信服的步伐。

GSO has $8 billion in dry powder to put to work when rates eventually rise and investors inevitably sell at least some of the bonds they’ve bought in recent years. In fact, the firm is preparing to be a buyer when rates rise and long-only mutual fund managers have to sell bonds to meet investor redemptions. Amid the froth GSO is now doing its preparatory work for the next crisis. Though investors seem to have set their concerns aside, GSO maintains that Europe poses the same risks to the global economy it always did and that rates must rise sometime in the next four years.

Patience is the key, says Smith, adding that GSO’s funds and compensation are structured in such a way that staffers don’t have to feel compelled to put money to work in deals that don’t make sense. The group has products that do better in different market environments, such as its closed-end funds and a new exchange-traded fund it recently launched with State Street Global Advisors. GSO is actively managing the leveraged-loan ETF, the first of its kind.

Europe currently offers GSO the greatest opportunities. But, as Smith says, it’s also a great place to lose money. The high-yield and leveraged-loan markets never developed there like they did in the U.S. Instead, banks dominated the leveraged-finance markets, with few institutional buyers such as high-yield mutual funds. In the U.S. banks provide about 30 percent of lending, with capital markets and investors providing the remainder. In Europe 70 to 75 percent of lending is done by banks. But that is likely to change as banks shed assets to deleverage and companies need capital. Smith calls Europe a huge opportunity — maybe a little like what Milken saw in the 1980s and DLJ in the ’90s.

But things are changing much more slowly in Europe than they did in the U.S. Every European country has its own business climate, union rules and regulatory system, and bankruptcy law isn’t always clear enough for a manager like GSO to get the assurance it needs to invest in a troubled company. Even so, GSO has 31 investment professionals in London, and they are doing more deals now than the firm is doing in the U.S.

金融危机最严重的近五年来，房地产市场终于在修补，投资者想知道房屋商的股票是否已经上涨了，华尔街新秩序的概要较高。排誉的银行正在退建到背景并与旨在阉割其资产负债表的新法规，使和平。金融行业的新电力经纪人是像GSO这样的金钱经理和投资者，控制真实资产。

“There is a wealth transfer going on from banks’ shareholders to the investors in our funds,” says Goodman.