Alternative Investments and Private Credit Market - Marathon Asset Management has over $23 billion in assets under management, attracting investments from family offices, wealth channels, insurance channels, and institutional channels [1] - Direct lending and asset-based lending yield 11-12%, while opportunistic credit yields 14-16%, making them more appealing than public credit markets [2][3] - Public credit markets show tight spreads, with investment grade corporate credit at the tightest spread since the 1990s, around the 0 percentile [3] - The high yield bond index OAS (Option-Adjusted Spread) is inside of 300, indicating tight spreads due to a strong economy, corporate earnings, and demand for credit [4][5] Asset-Based Lending (ABL) vs Direct Lending - Asset-based lending (ABL) is lending against hard assets at 65% LTVs, uncorrelated to direct lending which is cash flow based on EBITDA [6] - The correlation coefficient between asset-based lending and direct lending is 04, indicating low correlation despite both being high-yielding asset classes [7] Interest Rate and Economic Outlook - The speaker believes the Fed was slow to raise rates and will be slow to lower them, potentially easing in September 17th after reviewing jobs and CPI reports [9][10] - The current yield curve is V-shaped with SOFR at 435, 3-month bills at 420, 2-year bills at 375, and 10-year notes at 428, which is not normalized and increases government financing costs [11][12] - The speaker suggests the normalized rate for Fed funds should be 3%, given the slowing job growth (35 jobs a month) and economic growth (12% in the first half of the year) [13][14] - The speaker's base case is that economic growth will pick up in the second half of the year, with the front end of the yield curve having 150 basis points to come down [17]