Kieran Goodwin – Private Credit Concerns

**Kieran Goodwin** (0:00)
I've looked throughout my career for asset liability mismatches, and I truly believe that asset liability mismatches cause liquidity crunches, and liquidity crunches can cause credit crunches. Credit is correlated when it gets stressed. The bear case, which I'm not saying it's going to happen, but what happens is you get redemptions, you get some real defaults, you get force selling of private credit. And in the interval of funds, you just run out of what's liquid, and the bar to gate is really high. That goes on a feedback loop of where's the actual bid for private credit? It's hard to say.

**Ted Seides** (0:46)
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Kieran Goodwin, partner at Saba Capital, a $6 billion hedge fund manager that seeks to identify dislocations in credit and equity markets to generate convex returns in volatile times. Kieran has been one of the top credit traders on the street for the last three decades, across roles in investment banks in the 90s and early 2000s, King Street, his own hedge fund, Panning Capital, and most recently, Saba, that he joined in 2024 Our conversation covers a tour of Kieran's background, including early experience with credit derivatives, growth at King Street, lifespan of Panning, downtime between stints, and re-engagement with Boaz Weinstein at Saba. We then turn to risks in the private credit market, including its rapid growth, asset liability mismatches, pricing marks, leverage, liquidity, default risk, and the potential for reflexive problems. Kieran shares how managers should navigate the environment and how he's positioning Saba to benefit. Before we get going, after a long winter, we're starting to see green shoots in the changing of the season. Spring training for baseball, March madness for basketball, and the sunshine double in tennis all remind us that hope springs eternal. But these days, it's harder to be optimistic about another list of challenges. Private market liquidity, peace around the world, and keeping up with my son Eric in creating witty spread the word clips. Now I can't figure out what will happen in private credit, how the private equity bottleneck will ease, what benchmark should replace the S&P 500, or why so many people have reached out commenting on Eric's lack of interest in the show. But I do know that the answers await from our incredible guests, and you should encourage all your colleagues to listen in and find out that truth. Thanks so much for spreading the word. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction. But today, investors are asked to cover more companies and move faster with leaner teams. With AlphaSense's AI-led expert calls, their Tegas call service team sources experts based on your research criteria and lets the AI interviewer get to work. Then they take it one step further. Your call transcripts flow natively into your AlphaSense experience and become searchable and comparable, so your primary insights plug directly into your earnings, increase diligence, and pitch book workflows with no tool switching. AI for coverage and efficiency, humans for complexity and conviction. Sounds like just the right mix to create a scalable institutional edge without growing headcount. For hedge funds, this means validating thesis assumptions before earnings across dozens of experts instead of a handful. For private equity, it means faster pre-IOI scans and deeper commercial diligence. And for asset managers, it means pulling real operators' perspectives straight into models without disconnected tools or manual handoffs. All of this lives inside the AlphaSense platform, turning raw conversations into comparable auditable insight. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Learn more at alphasense.com/capital.
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**Kieran Goodwin** (5:03)
Happy to be here, Ted. Great to see you.

**Ted Seides** (5:05)
Why don't you take me back to what led you into finance in the first place?

**Kieran Goodwin** (5:10)
I was a computer science major at Duke in my junior year. A good friend of mine gave me a book. He said, I think you'll like this. And it was Liar's Poker. I read it in one night. Literally, it was a party that night and I stayed in my room, read the book in one sitting. I know Michael Lewis thought it was a way to dissuade people, but I took it the other way. I like math. I like puzzles. I liked risk, in a sense. Learned how to play poker with my grandparents when I was young. I hadn't really been much exposed to the markets, but after reading that book, I was like, this is something that fits me.