Well, this is Current Yield Grants Interest Rate Observer of the Air, and I am Jim Grant.

With me, as always, is the great deputy editor of Grant's, Evan Lorenz, and Henry French,

as our sound engineer, as per usual. And Evan, Evan, we have a guest today. And his name is

Sean Asmer, his CEO of a company called Triple Flag. And we'll get to Sean in just one moment.

In the meantime, Evan, this is high cotton times for the critics of fiat currency and kind of a crazy credit.

Do you have any sightings that you might contribute to this discussion?

Yeah, it's the weirdest juxtaposition in the world.

On the one hand, we have some of the tightest spreads and high-yield credit out there,

which is usually a sign that things are going swimmingly well. On the other hand, we got a report yesterday saying

nearly 10% of rated private credit issuers are under covenant relief. And of those under covenant

relief, just over a third of them can't even cover their interest expense out of EBITDA,

not even operating income. They're essentially insolvent entities in a benign economic

environment and at a time when creditors are you know pricing things as if everything's hunky dory

yeah there's news also about a new high and the so-called dividend recapitalization so if you

say you're a private equity promoter right you buy a public company and what do you do next?

You borrow, right?

Okay, so you load it up with debt and then you pay yourself a dividend on top of the debt.

Then you wait.

Wait, wait, wait, does that dividend come from cash flow?

No.

Then you wait, what, six or eight weeks?

If you're patient.

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