13 July 2026
9 new episodes (6.7 hours listening) published by the 38 podcasts on the list. 3 highlight clips below (8 mins total).
Investment 13 July 2026 · 3 clips
Capital Allocators
Frank Danieli
Head of Global Credit Solutions at MA Financial Group, an ASX-listed manager that oversees A$15 billion across private credit and lending strategies and A$179 billion of managed loans on its lending platform. He came out of restructuring and workouts, advising special situations funds, companies and banks on post-crisis recapitalisations.
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1 of 2 framework
Frank Danieli traces the order in which a lending market gives things up: price first, then covenants until 85% of it is covenant-lite, then the sacred rights in the documents, and only then does the lender start picking safer borrowers.
Software was where that ended up, on mission-critical systems of record whose recurring revenue and high margins read as margin of safety until AI arrived at the product itself. Danieli's reading is that the error sits in the structure of the business: a lender needs a diversified balance sheet, and choosing a better segment is what the ladder produces at its end.
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2 of 2 explainer
Australia's big four banks held 80% of lending before the financial crisis, and a regulator pushing them to be unquestionably strong moved car, equipment and business lending to specialists rather than to the sponsor-backed direct lenders that private credit means elsewhere.
Superannuation funds it: roughly $4 trillion, about three quarters in large institutional funds and $1 trillion in self-managed ones, compulsory and long dated. That capital is buying a fixed income alternative rather than equity returns through debt, which is why the book sits closer to investment grade than its offshore equivalents.
Hidden Forces
Mary Bridges
Historian of twentieth-century America and a senior fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, previously at Harvard's Belfer Center. Her book Dollars and Dominion reconstructs the International Banking Corporation from National Archives and City Bank records; she was a business journalist before she was a historian.
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explainer
The Federal Reserve was not built to buy government debt, Mary Bridges says: lending to the state was thought beneath a central bank, and the design called for buying private trade paper instead.
Trade credit carried the politics of 1913. Real bills were held to be non-inflationary because they were tied to goods actually being produced, which made the new institution saleable to a Congress suspicious of the money trust and to agricultural interests who would not wear a Wall Street instrument, whatever it turned into afterwards.