First Brands and Tricolor: Red Flags and Lessons

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We’re almost 200 episodes in, and we’ve been waiting for the perfect guest to come on to explain distressed debt investing... the wait is over. In this episode, we’re joined by Michael Gatto, who quite literally wrote the book on credit with The Credit Investor’s Handbook, and serves as the head of private side investing (private markets) at Silver Point, a $41 billion credit asset management firm. With private credit dominating headlines for all the wrong reasons - fraud, liquidations like Tri-Color, and restructurings like First Brands - we use this conversation to ask: what actually happens when private credit deals go sideways?

Michael walks us through the world of distressed debt investing: what it is, how it differs from value equity and private equity, and why phrases like “liability management exercises” are just a sanitized way to describe creditor-on-creditor violence. We talk through the mechanics of LMEs, getting J-screwed, up-tiering, CLOs, covenant-lite loans, and how “too much money chasing too few deals” set the stage for today’s blow-ups. He also explains why the press loves calling distressed investors vultures, why he thinks they’re often actually the heroes of the story, and how distressed funds can end up owning companies outright through bankruptcy.

We also zoom out to the bigger picture: where we are in the credit cycle, why private credit has grown so explosively since 2008, and why Michael thinks some funds are absolutely going to blow up—but the system won’t. He shares red flags from situations like First Brands and why the current ratio is a joke. Along the way, we get Michael’s incredible career story (including how he negotiated his way into Goldman via a temp agency), his philosophy on learning, mentorship, and networking, and practical advice for anyone curious about private credit, distressed debt, or building a career in credit investing.

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