In finance journalism, the acronym HOTS stands for "Heard on the Street," the somewhat opinionated and somewhat gossipy column made famous, and made into a mover of markets, by Dan Dorfman in the 1960s. Someone would advance the history of this branch of journalism if he could only write a comprehensive history of this column, from its earliest days in the 1930s to and through Dorfman's day to the notorious reign there of Foster Winans in the 1980s. Anyway, Jonathan Weil writes it now. Weil, whose expertise as a forensic accountant has long given an edge to his journalism, defends the management of Blue Owl, a large alternative asset manager that specializes in private credit. Private credit funds typically act as non-bank lenders to mid-market businesses. Blue Owl in particular has become controversial of late for its relative illiquidity. Specifically, it has lent a lot of money to firms on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, also known as the app econom...
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I see from a recent "Heard on the Street" column that the investment bank Goldman Sachs has an operational unit that it calls "the Federation." As explained in the column, the Federation combines range of back office activities that do not generate revenue themselves but are nonetheless of great significance: accounting, legal, compliance, risk management etc. Goldman Sach's management committee is apparently divided three ways: representatives from sales and trading, reps from investment banking, and those from the Federation. The HOTS column cannot help but make Star Wars references here (a powerful organization known simply as the Trade Federation is manipulated by Sith Lords, an important plot point in the three prequel movies.). Personally, I would have made Star Trek references instead. The Federation of Planets, after all, constitute the good guys of that universe, not puppets of the bad guys. Still, to each his own. Anyway, the news conten...