Howard Marks sat down for an interview with Barron’s recently. Howard Marks discussed the distressed debt market, his upbringing, some of his favorite equities among other topics. MARKS FOCUSES on the rough-and-tumble world of distressed corporate debt, and his memos provide a window into his real-time thinking during some of the most convulsive periods in financial history. By late 2007, for example, Marks became convinced that the unraveling of the subprime-mortgage sector was just a symptom of much greater malaise in U.S. credit markets. He pointed to private-equity buyouts of companies done at absurdly high prices and bloated levels of debt. Those deals would make sense “only if nothing untoward happened,” he wrote. And that, he believed, was anything but a safe assumption.
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