Demystifying Capital Solutions Strategies

Greg Campion: The term capital solutions has grown in popularity in recent years among asset managers, sponsors, borrowers, and institutional investors. This is driven in part by the need for borrowers and sponsors to find flexible financing solutions that don't always fit into traditional categories, be they public market financing or even traditional middle market direct lending. It's also driven by institutional investors increasing appetite for uncorrelated income streams and unique origination channels. But how exactly do you define capital solutions and why are institutional investors increasingly allocating capital to the space?

Mike Searles: Companies are genuinely looking for solutions, and those are solutions that they can't find in a traditional vertical. Be that traditional vertical, if we simplify it, traditional private equity, traditional direct lending, or traditional syndicated debt or high yield bonds, they're looking for something that they can't find in that market. We've got the asset management capability, both leveraging Barings as a firm and all the capabilities Barings has, but also within our team directly to be able to source assets and then to be able to manage them.

Greg Campion: That was Mike Searles, Head of North America for Barings Capital Solutions Business, and this is Streaming Income, a podcast from Barings. I'm your host, Greg Campion. Coming up on the show, demystifying capital solutions strategies. Before we get into the conversation, if you're not ready following us, and you're interested in hearing our latest thoughts on asset classes ranging from high yield and private credit to real estate and more, just search Streaming Income on Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. With that, here's my conversation with Mike Searles. All right, Mike Searles, welcome to the podcast.

Mike Searles: Thanks for having me.

Greg Campion: I'm psyched to have you here. I'm psyched to talk about capital solutions today, which is your area of expertise. I think it's an area that probably needs some demystifying, so we're calling this episode Demystifying Capital Solutions Strategies, and I am psyched to dive in on that. But maybe before we do, this is your first time on the podcast, so it'd be great for our listeners just to hear a little bit about what your role is here at Barings and maybe what you were doing before you joined the firm.

Mike Searles: Sure. So currently I run the North American Capital Solutions Business. Prior to that, had joined Barings about almost seven years ago. Really, my career has been spent in distressed debt, both on the investing side and the workout side. Came to the world through with a GFC, started my career during the GFC, and over that period of time have had a variety of roles, whether it's investing par credit or in performing situations over that period of time, but really the vast majority of it's been investing in and working out distressed situations.

Greg Campion: Okay, got it. Yeah, really coming from that distressed background, I can't believe you've been here almost seven years already. Somebody was just asking me that question, and I said, " I think he's been here about three years." Because I remember the day you joined. Okay. Apparently time is going much faster.

Mike Searles: It's hard to believe I've lived in Charlotte for almost seven years.

Greg Campion: Yeah. Well, okay, so let's talk about that real quick. So you're a Long Island guy, born and bred.

Mike Searles: Yeah.

Greg Campion: What is the top thing about Charlotte compared to Long Island or what is the worst thing?

Mike Searles: I mean, since I've been here, I've had plenty of children, so it's obviously a fantastic place to raise a family, so it's absolutely just all the things that it affords a family and being able to get outside year round and all the activities that are available to them. It's amazing.

Greg Campion: Yeah, totally agree. What's the worst thing compared to Long Island?

Mike Searles: I always say, even I spent 10 years almost in the city, and so if you compare it to the city, it's what do you miss most? What do you miss least? And the answer's the same. It's the buzz. So it's leaving the office at nine o'clock at night and having there be activity, and it's the opposite in terms of what I miss least is every time I go there, I feel like my heart rate jumps immediately as I'm getting there and even from the time I land to the time I leave, and so I definitely miss the energy, but I don't miss the energy to a certain extent.

Greg Campion: Somehow I completely understand that. As somebody who used to live in New York City, when I go back now, and I love New York City, lived there for seven or eight years, but I also have that same feeling. It's like I'm like, " Oh my gosh. This place is crazy. How did I live here for seven or eight years?" It's a whole different buzz. I thought you were going to say the pizza. I think Charlotte's got some work to do on the pizza front.

Mike Searles: We're getting there though.

Greg Campion: Yeah, it's okay. All right, so let's talk a little bit about capital solutions. So obviously this is a term that's really come into prominence, especially I would say in the last five years or so. You've seen managers like us launching capital solutions strategies. You've seen institutional investors gaining more and more interest in these types of strategies. There's still some confusion out there, I feel like, in terms of how do you define a capital solution strategy? I think it probably still differs manager to manager in terms of exactly what that is, and so I think that what we want to do today is kind of talk about, at least from our perspective, what a capital solution strategy is, why investors are, we're seeing increased interest in them, what some of the benefits are, what some of the risks are, et cetera. So maybe let's start there. Just talk to me a little bit about from that Barings' perspective, how do you and the team think about what a capital solutions strategy is?

Mike Searles: So from our standpoint, to take a step back, I think we rebranded the strategy three years ago and had previously branded ourselves special situations, and I think when we rebranded the strategy, we actually took a step back and said, " Well, what do we do and how do we go to market? What do we embrace?" We kind of came upon capital solutions in a more organic way, and it was based on the view of in these situations, companies, and this may go without saying, but companies are genuinely looking for solutions, and those are solutions that they can't find in a traditional vertical. Be that traditional vertical, if we simplify it, traditional private equity, traditional direct lending, or traditional syndicated debt or high yield bonds, they're looking for something that they can't find in that market. It doesn't necessarily imply inherent risk to it or excess risk to it, it's just not an off the shelf product that somebody's looking for. And so part of what we've always done as a business is being able to look at the other side of the table, even if it was in a distress situation where there were multi- party bilateral negotiations or multi- party negotiations, being able to look at all sides of the table and say, " What are you looking to get out of this? What are we looking to get out of this? And how do we negotiate a transaction that meets in the middle?" And so that's really kind of the genesis of how we think about the world and why we branded ourselves that way. So what does that result in? It results in, from our standpoint, we look to generate returns at a high level, 300 to 600 basis points wide of traditional direct lending. It happens from our standpoint to be predominantly really what we define as a secure debt strategy with upside, but how we get there is obviously kind of where the fun lies. And again, that's really looking at things and saying, somebody is looking for a solution that they can't find in the traditional market on an off the shelf product. So what does that entail? A fair bit of structuring work and negotiation around what the hot buttons are, the hot topics are, structuring around that, and really then pricing and structuring risk. So the platform has always been a platform that really, when we go back to our days as a buying secondary stress, distress debt, the question was always just, is there a price for it and at what level? It wasn't, " This is at 90, do we buy it or not"? It was, at what price do we buy something? We still employ that methodology and that thought process. It just happens to be more on a private basis now in directly negotiated situations.

Greg Campion: Okay. Okay, great overview. Thank you for that. All right, there's so much I want to follow up on there and so much I want to dive into. So let's start with the returns, and let me just say from a compliance standpoint, we're certainly not promising returns here et cetera, but you mentioned that you're targeting a return premium relative to I think kind of down the middle or middle market direct lending deals, right? So did you say 300 to?

Mike Searles: 300 to 600.

Greg Campion: 300 to 600. Okay. So that's pretty significant premium that you're targeting relative to kind of plain vanilla, middle market, direct lending deals. So you just gave me the impression that that premium does not necessarily come from investing in riskier deals. So talk to me about where that premium comes from.

Mike Searles: Yeah, I mean to me it's more the story that gets somebody to why they're seeking capital. It comes from things, if you take specific examples, investing in a company that wants to make an investment in growth, they want to go build a plant, or they want to make an acquisition where you have to look at it and say there's something beyond just, " Hey, like for like, tucking an acquisition, it's going to be four times levered, and we're comfortable with that. Let's move on." There's more of a story to that. And so what do we do in something like that? It involves a much deeper level of diligence of work, companies that are going through transformation or transition that a traditional platform in the direct lending space would look at and say, " It's not a four times levered LBO. We're not doing it." There's plenty of businesses out there that are going through transformational events where the traditional kind of off- the- shelf markets have shut them down, and so it's really just understanding a story. It's not a product that's built for tremendous amounts of repeatability. Every situation is different, and so we have to apply a different lens to all of those situations and structure around them. Obviously that's a different supply- demand environment. There's less competitors around it. We always say we don't compete in something where somebody is sending out a hundred SIMs and looking for the lowest possible price. They're looking for either speed and reliability, certainty of execution. They're going to five counterparties or five providers who they know can deliver a solution either if it's efficiently or just have the toolkit to be able to structure something. So you're competing in a different market, and it's not a race to the bottom. It's oftentimes the ability to execute on something and look at the person on the other side of the table and say, " This is where you want to go. How do we collectively get you there?" That's just not something that if you look at a regular way middle market lending platform, it's a difference in the thought process and how they ultimately look to generate deal flow.

Greg Campion: When you talk about targeting a return premium, 300 too 600 basis points above traditional middle market direct lending, I think maybe the first inclination is, " Oh, okay, I see what these guys are doing. This is junior capital, subordinated debt, et cetera." That's not what this is, and so I think that distinction is important, but actually I think it's going to get easier if, we should talk through some examples because I think it's almost easier when you kind of go through some of the specifics. But maybe before we do that, let me just ask you, so you mentioned that kind of the heritage of your group was the special situations group, which I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I think dates back to'08 timeframe within.

Mike Searles: It did. It did. Yeah.

Greg Campion: I'm sure there was quite a bit of distress around at that time. I can remember being at Lehman Brothers at that time, certainly there was a lot of stress going on. But let's talk a little bit about that just because I want to understand how much of what you guys are doing today would be kind of akin to some of that more traditional distressed or special situation stuff and how similar or different, what you're doing today, what the group does today versus what you think about it in a traditional distressed strategy.

Mike Searles: Yeah, I mean, much of where the business has emanated from has informed the strategy today, and we call it the strategy and evolution, right? It's a constantly evolving strategy, and we're always looking to continue to evolve it and look at what's relevant in the market and figure out how we can remain relevant and remain a market leader. And I think that's been core to certainly what I joined, and I've known Barings and its predecessor, Babson, since I started my career. And it's going back to when I started my career at Credit Suisse, Barings, or Babson at the time, and Credit Suisse had a fantastic relationship, and I'd interacted with the team here going back to those days. And really the core kind of competency that Babson and now Barings had at the time was being bottoms up credit driven. And that platform was really a CLO driven platform, but was a credit driven CLO platform, a bottoms up, credit driven CLO platform. And so very early on during that period of time, they all got in a room and said, " We are going to pick winners, and we're going to get out of losers." And that was in a very meticulous way focused on core fundamental underlying trends of the business. And then out of that, they realized, " Well, we need pockets of capital actually to be able to exercise views." So they did that to a certain extent. They exited things that they weren't comfortable in, and they bought things that they were comfortable in within the structures and the vehicles that they had in place. But that was really kind of the genesis of what became special situations was let's create a vehicle where we can express that view. And Babson at the time was probably one of, if not the first in the market, to do that. And so obviously that's always been core to what we are, right, is bottoms up driven. Let's look at each situation on its own and engage in really comprehensive diligence around that and identify a price at which we're willing to purchase it. And so that continued and really the strategy had evolved. We developed competencies along that period of time, certainly being more capable of owning businesses and being more relevant in discussions around negotiations, being more relevant shareholders in companies, and developed all those capabilities and competencies. The platform around it grew, so the firm's high yield and leverage loan platform grew in a significant way throughout that period of time. And when I joined, it really came to a point where we were already very relevant in all of the underlying companies. A strategy continued to be secondary market focused. We were buying stressed and distressed secondary market leverage loans and high yield bonds. And over that course of time, we'd always had the competency to do private deals, private deals in the context of bankruptcies and stress situations where we're doing rescue financings, dip financings, equity rights offerings, things like that. That was always inherent in the platform. And we had that capability. I think as we started to see the market evolve, we saw a couple things, right? One was that CLOs really stopped selling. So in traditional distress situations, historically in the market, CLOs would sell their paper, and that created kind of a dislocation in the market and a technical environment in the market where there was inherent value in purchasing these instruments because of that technical. They stopped doing it, and so liquidity in these situations dried up significantly, and the technical went away. And so just therein lies the risk adjusted returns are less interesting. The other thing that happened is we've seen bankruptcy costs rise tremendously. I mean, when I first joined and started in this industry, the cost of filing a business is at least if not more than five times the cost it was 10, 15 years ago. So you combine kind of a change in the technical landscape with an advance or the escalation of the cost of actually effectuating these transactions, and there's a host of follow on consequences to all of that, but really it's a far less interesting market and place to be. But what we did identify was really that document erosion was another point in the syndicated loan market and one that we embraced. We knew it was there, but what it led to was let's look at these situations different. Let's look at them from the context of liability management transactions. Can we finance subsidiaries of struggling companies in a private context? And ultimately structure deals around identified risks, still price risk the same that we would always do, but have much better document protections on a bilateral basis where we're kind of the only or part of a small club of investors. That really started prior to COVID. So 2019, we said, this is where the market is going, and ironically, there was a Bloomberg article two weeks ago or something like that kind of talked about liability management transactions. For us that started in 2019. And for many reasons that trade has actually kind of gone away. The market's evolved from that even, right? But that's what that really started kind of the evolution of the business to what it is today which is predominantly, almost entirely a private driven platform that's direct lending driven was kind of looking at those types of transactions, deals beget deals. And so it started as liability management, subsidiary financings, rescue financings, things like that to now today it's really just an all weather financing platform that again looks at things that are off the shelf or not off the shelf I should say.

Greg Campion: I feel like I just learned a lot listening to that, to be honest with you. That was a good little walk back through history. And of course a lot of the business-

Mike Searles: Much of which I can't take credit for at all.

Greg Campion: But a lot of the people who are in the rooms in those early days are still very much there.

Mike Searles: They are.

Greg Campion: Like Adrian Butler on the COO side, obviously Brian High who's recently taken on Head of our Global Private Finance Business, Stuart Matheson.

Mike Searles: Mike, obviously, right? I mean, Mike-

Greg Campion: Mike Reno.

Mike Searles: A huge influence in it for sure. Was part of our business at one point I mean in a certain way.

Greg Campion: Yep. And Eric Lloyd, who we've been doing middle market direct lending for 30 some odd years, but really in its current iteration, that group really was started by Eric Lloyd in 2014 or so. And so that kind of direct lending element to which you guys are really focused on today really kind of traces its history back to then. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about where you're seeing opportunities today. So you guys have a broad remit in that you can go across public markets, private markets, you've got access to the full Barings global platform, 400 billion, a lot of stuff to look at. I almost wonder how you narrow it down, but let's just talk a little bit about the market opportunity you see today. Maybe as we sit here right now, where are you and the team maybe right now or this year seeing the most attractive value?

Mike Searles: We continue to be very focused on the insurance segment. Insurance for us is our largest industry. Vertical insurance inherently is an exceptionally broad industry. There are so many touch points to it. And what we like about it more specifically is it's got regulatory capital constraints. So it's inherently inefficient from a capitalization standpoint. Those are situations we love. How do we find ways where we can create capital efficiencies for underlying issuers or underlying portfolio companies and create a solution for them, but they're still willing to pay us a contractual return that meets our return threshold at the same time they're benefiting from it. So insurance, we continue to find ways to unlock value in that space, in that category.

Greg Campion: Now, what would that look like? Would that be taking ownership of an insurance company? Lending to an insurance company?

Mike Searles: So we've done transactions where we've bought risk or were exposed to underlying risk of policies where we see great diversification and lack of market correlation and loss rates and a history of loss rates, for example, that is consistent and stands out. That's a great pocket of capital for us. And so we bought property and casualty sidecar reinsurance vehicles where we're kind of the only capital in the structure. We take a direct quota share of reinsurance risk or the underlying policy risk, and we capitalize the vehicle. We own the upside and the downside of it, but ultimately we're protected through excess of loss coverage to the extent loss rates exceed certain thresholds. We get the benefit of tremendous downside protection in those instances. In a lot of them that we've done over the last three years, the insurance market and the property and casualty space has been exceptionally hard, so we've benefited from pricing increases. As everybody would know, the cost of their auto insurance is definitely not cheaper than it was three years ago, for example. And so benefiting from that and the rate environment, obviously you capitalize these vehicles, they invest in liquid treasuries to kind of continue to generate some return. As rates have risen, they've been very, very attractive assets for us. So things like that. We also invest in underlying managing general agents. People are actually writing risk in certain instances, and we've done loan transactions in those instances. We've done loan transactions where we participate in the equity, so we've kind of done high bid loan and equity transactions for companies seeking capital, looking for a long- term partner. We're obviously affiliated with MassMutual, so they're looking for a good partner that understands the space they're playing in, and oftentimes are willing to kind partner with some equity along the way to kind of bring us in as a strategic partner to them. So we've done transactions like that. It's a pretty complicated space, so there's a lot of variations to that space in particular that we're always exploring and figuring out how to unlock capital in an efficient way.

Greg Campion: Yeah, well, I mean that doesn't surprise me that insurance is kind of the area of expertise for your team, just given the broader center of expertise within Barings. We're a wholly owned subsidiary of MassMutual. We've got insurance investors that represent our largest external capital that we manage, and we've got an insurance solutions team in- house here, and I'm sure you're leveraging all of the above in terms of the analysis that you're doing and pricing risk, et cetera. So that's interesting. So insurance is one. I know you and the team are active in some of these non- corporate credit transactions areas like structured asset- based finance. Demystify that one a little bit for me.

Mike Searles: Look, where we are focused predominantly, and we're looking at opportunities where we have broadly diversified risk, we're less correlated, or in the best instance, not correlated with broader markets. Again, get that diversification in underlying kind of risk. And so in terms of structured products or structured asset finance, as we tend to call it, we've done situations where in pharmaceutical royalties, we've been invested in, we own a litigation finance business, and we invest in some of their deals alongside them as well as obviously owning them. We own one of the largest non- bank ABL lending providers in the market and can partner with them in a variety of situations, can support them, see deal flow through them, and deliver some of those structured solutions in the context of all of those portfolio companies. But pharmaceutical royalties are a good example where we're in some instances buying royalty rights. In other instances, structuring looking at contractual cash flow of underlying issuers. Again, pharmaceutical royalties being one of them, looking at pharmaceutical sales revenue and being able to advance capital against future revenues that are derived from an underlying drug. That's all kind of things we've been doing and are going to continue to look and accelerate that process. There's so much out there that if you look at and you just say there's a fundamental asset that derives cash flows, and I want access to long- term cash flows, and the counterpart on the other side wants capital to fund growth, to fund whatever it is that they're looking to do. That's really where we're focused. We own a marina business, for example.

Greg Campion: Streaming Income podcast listeners will be familiar.

Mike Searles: They are familiar with that.

Greg Campion: Yeah. We've done an episode on Coastal Marinas. If you haven't heard that one, go back and listen to that. Super interesting business.

Mike Searles: One of the things we're looking at right now is they have contractual revenue from their members, and they have slips in a marina. Is there a way to actually look at structuring a financing to capitalize and purchase actually just marina slip revenue and structure that for the long term, and then have our affiliate there be a management company? So things like that that we're always looking for, that I think is really where you're going to see us go more so in the future in a much bigger way.

Greg Campion: You kind of referenced this a couple of times. So you mentioned some of the kind of third party origination platforms that Barings owns or has a stake in or has a partnership with. Just tell me a little bit more broadly. I know you think about, I think every manager out there says they've got unique origination, so to speak. But I'm curious, from a Barings perspective, what do you think is differentiated about the way that you all source deals?

Mike Searles: Sure. Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, our platform, we think about internally as a service provider as well. So we purposely sit horizontally across Barings and the goal being take the best of what Barings does as a platform across all of its investment capabilities, leverage that, and then also deliver a structuring component, again, for those situations where we may have an industry expert in a particular industry who's covered a company for 15 years or has covered, and we have comp sets on kind of an industry, for example, but that company or a peer in that company is looking for a solution that is not offered or that we need to develop a more structured solution for. And what I think about us is, what we've said internally is anybody who gets something in or where there's an inbounded opportunity, if they don't know where it's supposed to go, but they know it doesn't fit them, send it to us. And so there's been a great kind of collaboration across Barings where that's acknowledged and understood. And we support them at the same time with situations, again, if they run into something that they've never seen before, likely throughout our platform, we've seen something similar in some way, shape, or form or have dealt with a situation that would resemble what they're going through, and we can deliver that expertise and support to them. That's a great foundational starting point. Our high- yield business covers, I think last we saw 2, 500 credits in any given time. They've got a database that goes back before GFC in many instances where we can look at transactions that were done with any portfolio company throughout that period of time and kind of follow that and be informed as to what's happening there. Our private credit business, obviously between sponsor relationships and their underlying issuers, it's a tremendous sourcing network that we have within the firm. Beyond that, our focus has been and continues to be, let's go find origination platforms that one we can invest in, but two, also will bring deal flow alongside that. And so we've invested in an ABL lending platform, a litigation finance platform, a marina platform. We have an aviation leasing platform. We have a trailer leasing platform. All of those bring opportunities alongside that, whether we're investing in it through that platform or we're investing in it alongside them, or we're leveraging all the capabilities we have within those platforms to make investments that are correlated or alongside those platforms. That's a pretty key component to how we're thinking about origination going forward and how we're going to continue to expand the universe of what we can invest in and grow the book.

Greg Campion: Okay. Okay. Yeah, that's a great overview. Is there anything, I'm just curious in terms of your comment about if you don't know what to do with it, send it to us. It's kind of really intriguing to me. Is there anything that jumps out at you that was either a really strange deal that was sent to you or something that you thought was odd at first but ended up being a tremendous opportunity? Anything that you can think of along those lines?

Mike Searles: I mean, we've seen some really, really wonky stuff over the years. It's funny, one of the portfolio companies that we own actually, and they sent me some product, they manufacture pepperoni.

Greg Campion: Pepperoni.

Mike Searles: And they actually sent me some product the other day, and our mail room actually called up and said, " Hey, we have something here that's marked perishable." Like, what is somebody sending something to the office before you marked perishable?

Greg Campion: Interesting.

Mike Searles: So we come across a host of things in any given time that is kind of random.

Greg Campion: Okay. That comes back to our pizza discussion at the top of this conversation. Maybe there's a way you guys can figure out how to invest in getting better pizza to Charlotte. All right. So I think we covered everything I was hoping to cover. I wanted to ask you just again, I want to just kind of acknowledge that this space is probably less defined to many investors, but I think we've talked about, I think most institutional investors these days are comfortable. They have core allocations to parts of the market, like direct lending specifically, they're ready to, or very willing to look at the next iteration of private capital asset classes, and I think a lot of them may consider what you and the team are doing here in that kind of category. So I want to just finish up from their perspective. So if you think about, put yourself in the shoes of an institutional investor who's basically in that position that I just described, what would be the questions that you would be asking to managers like Barings to figure out if they had the right kind of capabilities set up, etc, to deliver on this type of strategy?

Mike Searles: Yeah, I mean, origination to me is truly understanding origination, and you mentioned it earlier, everybody says that they've got a differentiated origination approach. The reality is that very few do. I mean, you can't make money, or you can't generate returns if you don't have product. Beyond that, I'd say when I look at our platform, our platform has been built through iterations, right? We absorbed a private equity real assets business that is very core to our platform in reality.

Greg Campion: Well, it's why you have really extensive in- house expertise in areas like pharmaceutical royalties like we discussed earlier.

Mike Searles: That's right. And what that's driven. We have a lawyer on our team that's on the investment team that has spent a career in litigation, finance, and restructuring. We're a team of athletes, and so we have that broad depth of capability, and we can see something and be able to kind of again, process it and develop a solution for it. Now, again, that's origination, but it's also asset management, right? We've got the asset management capability, both leveraging Barings as a firm and all the capabilities Barings has, but also within our team directly to be able to source assets and then to be able to manage them. And so what do you do when something goes bad? And I hear things out there from peers and other people out there, but the reality is, have you actually been through a situation where something's not going well? And what you do, quite frankly before it's really the crunch time, actually informs returns and recoveries far more than what you do the day the company runs out of cash, let's say. That protects returns. And so those two to me are the biggest things. Origination. If you don't have product, you can't generate returns. And then ultimately, do you have the team and the capabilities and the depth of a platform to be able to manage situations as they evolve, and maybe some of them, and not all of them go the way that you underwrite, and you need to be able to focus on how you're going to get out of situations when they don't.

Greg Campion: Yep, that makes sense. That makes sense. And yeah, I mean, I think that's especially important right now where a lot of these companies are struggling with dealing with higher interest rates, and that's coming to bite in many cases. And I think it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, is just the heritage of this group coming from that special situations distress side of things. I know that today the strategy that you all manage is really an all- weather strategy. It's not just non- performing credits, et cetera, but when those situations arise, it's pretty helpful to have that distressed background and having worked through all these situations before. So, well, Mike, this has been huge. I think hopefully we have demystified capital solutions to some degree.

Mike Searles: Either that or we further complicated it.

Greg Campion: If not, we'll call this part one and maybe there'll be a part two at some point. But really appreciate your time today. Great.

Mike Searles: Thanks for having me.

Greg Campion: Thanks for listening to or watching this episode of Streaming Income. If you'd like to stay up to date on our latest thoughts on asset classes ranging from high yield and private credit to real estate debt and equity, make sure to follow us and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and more. And if you have specific feedback, you can email us at podcast @ barings. com. That's podcast at B- A- R- I- N- G- S. com. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.